IntroductionWelcome| 00:06 | As photographers, we spend a lot of
time thinking about technical concerns,
| | 00:10 | like exposure theory, or trying to
find interesting subjects or locations, or
| | 00:15 | maybe wondering if a new piece of gear might
inspire us or make our images more interesting.
| | 00:20 | And these might all be the
worthwhile things to think about.
| | 00:23 | But really, as photographers, there is
one concerned that should command our
| | 00:27 | attention more than any other, light.
| | 00:29 | It's just that simple.
| | 00:31 | If you don't have good light, it
doesn't matter what kind of you have gear you
| | 00:35 | have, how much you know, or
what you are you shooting.
| | 00:37 | With bad light, you will
be taking an inferior image.
| | 00:41 | With good light, you can take
otherwise mundane subject matter and create
| | 00:45 | an interesting photo.
| | 00:46 | Now the problem is, you can't always
count on the light in the scene. Sometimes
| | 00:51 | it will be flat, sometimes it will be
too harsh. But probably the most common
| | 00:55 | lighting problem is
simply not having enough of it.
| | 00:58 | Low light makes exposure more difficult
and often makes a photographer think that a
| | 01:02 | scene is simply not shootable.
| | 01:04 | Low-light situations can
happen at any time of day.
| | 01:07 | Step into a dimly lit room and
suddenly you are facing potential
| | 01:10 | exposure difficulties.
| | 01:11 | Therefore, to be effective in the
greatest number of shooting situations, you
| | 01:15 | need to have good skills for knowing how to
handle the problems presented by low light.
| | 01:21 | Low light levels though are not always a
problem; sometimes they are an opportunity.
| | 01:25 | The world looks very different when
light levels dim and light sources change
| | 01:29 | from sunlight to artificial light.
| | 01:31 | Learning to recognize and exploit low-
light situations can open up an entirely
| | 01:36 | new world of subject matter.
| | 01:37 | A scene that might have been blaze to
you in the daytime, might turn fascinating
| | 01:41 | once the sun goes down.
| | 01:43 | If you have got good low-light skills,
you can take advantage of this different
| | 01:46 | view of the same scene.
| | 01:49 | In this course, we are going to take a
look at all kinds of low-light shooting
| | 01:52 | situations, from trying to get good
results in a dimly lit room in your house to
| | 01:57 | prowling around in the dark, looking
for photos that cannot exist with higher
| | 02:01 | light levels. On rare occasions, we
will be handling low light by adding
| | 02:05 | lighting of our own.
| | 02:06 | But in most situations, we will be
looking at working with available light levels,
| | 02:10 | even when it appears that a scene
is way too dark to get a good shot.
| | 02:14 | So grab your camera and maybe take a
nap, because were going to be staying up
| | 02:18 | late, waiting for light levels to dim,
and exploring all the different aspects
| | 02:22 | and possibilities presented by
low-light and night shooting.
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1. Setting the StageWhat can you shoot in low light?| 00:00 | Very often, you know what the subject
you want to shoot is, but light levels in
| | 00:04 | the scene are low enough that
getting the shot can be difficult.
| | 00:08 | For example, a holiday dinner with your
family, you know you want to shoot your
| | 00:11 | relatives and maybe the food, but
the room is lit only by candles.
| | 00:16 | With that low light level, it's going to be
hard to freeze motion and get a sharp image.
| | 00:21 | We will be looking at how to handle
those situations later in this course.
| | 00:24 | But low light isn't always a problem.
| | 00:27 | If you know how to work with
it, low light can open up new
| | 00:30 | photographic possibilities.
| | 00:32 | Now it's a fairly obvious statement to
say that the world looks very different
| | 00:36 | at night or in very low light.
| | 00:38 | But let's think for a minute
about why it looks different.
| | 00:42 | First, with less light, some
things are simply less visible.
| | 00:46 | Now that can really change where
your eye is drawn to in an image.
| | 00:50 | In other words, in low light, the
subject of a scene may shift dramatically
| | 00:55 | simply because of what's visible.
| | 00:57 | During the day we mostly live by
sunlight. When the sun goes down other light
| | 01:01 | sources take over and those light
sources are not always so high overhead.
| | 01:07 | This change in the direction of lighting can
lead to very different textures in a scene.
| | 01:12 | What's more, they can have a heavy influence on
what the subject of the scene is, and very
| | 01:16 | often this different type of lighting
can be an interesting subject in itself.
| | 01:21 | Finally, the type of lighting you get
in low-light situations or at nighttime
| | 01:26 | can simply create plays of light and
shadow that do not exist in the daytime:
| | 01:31 | reflections, highlights, interesting
shadows, splashes of light. There can be
| | 01:35 | all sorts of light features that don't
appear in the same scene under brighter light.
| | 01:41 | So honing your low-light skills offers
not just the ability to capture images
| | 01:45 | that can be difficult;
| | 01:47 | as you learn to shoot in low light,
you should find yourself discovering
| | 01:50 | shooting opportunities that you simply
had not seen before, possibly in locations
| | 01:55 | that you are already familiar with.
| | 01:57 | Learning to shoot in low light is as
much about learning to see differently
| | 02:01 | and recognize a different type of
subject matter as it is learning any
| | 02:05 | particular technical process.
| | 02:06 | And that makes the study of low-light
shooting a worthwhile pursuit, no matter
| | 02:10 | how much you ultimately end up doing it.
| | 02:12 | Because the more you can learn
about seeing, the better all of your
| | 02:15 | photography will be.
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| What you need for this course| 00:01 | If the photographic world were still
limited to only film cameras, then this
| | 00:04 | would be a very different course, for the
simple reason that we would not be able
| | 00:08 | to shoot in some of the
situations that you're going to see.
| | 00:11 | The fact is, we just don't have the film
technology that can compare to digital
| | 00:15 | when working in low light.
| | 00:17 | Digital image sensors are incredibly
sensitive to light and so are ideal for
| | 00:21 | working at night or in
other low-light situations.
| | 00:25 | Digital cameras today possess sensors
that have ISO ratings and signal-to-noise
| | 00:29 | responses that far surpass any film technology.
| | 00:32 | So as a digital shooter, you have a new
realm of subject matter to explore once
| | 00:37 | light levels get lower.
| | 00:39 | If you're coming from a film background
then you might be shocked to find out
| | 00:42 | what's possible in low light
with a good digital camera.
| | 00:45 | Now, by good I mean a camera that
provides the ability to raise the ISO while
| | 00:51 | still delivering results
that offer low noise levels.
| | 00:54 | These days most SLRs and some advanced
point-and-shoots offer ISOs up to 1600.
| | 01:00 | Some go even farther with professional
grade SLRs providing ludicrously high
| | 01:05 | ISOs, like 125,000 and higher.
| | 01:09 | Noise is simply those ugly grainy
patterns that can appear when you raise ISO,
| | 01:13 | and we'll be looking at
noise in more detail later.
| | 01:16 | In addition to a camera that
provides good high ISO capability, it's also
| | 01:20 | helpful to have a camera
that can shoot in RAW format.
| | 01:23 | Getting accurate white balance in
low light can be tricky and because RAW lets
| | 01:27 | you alter white balance after you shoot,
editing your low-light images in RAW can
| | 01:32 | be much easier than working with JPEG files.
| | 01:35 | As light levels drop, we will often be
taking more manual control of the camera.
| | 01:40 | So a camera that offers Priority
modes and a Full Manual mode can be
| | 01:45 | critical for low light work.
| | 01:47 | A faster lens--that is a lens that can
open to a wider aperture--can afford you
| | 01:52 | a lot more exposure latitude when
you're working in low light and a lens that's
| | 01:56 | stabilize can make it
easier to shoot sharp images.
| | 01:59 | Speaking of stabilization, a tripod or
monopod or other stabilization device can
| | 02:04 | be critical for low-light shooting.
| | 02:07 | If you don't have a camera with these
features or you don't have a nice tripod,
| | 02:10 | don't rush out yet and buy new gear.
| | 02:12 | Work through the course, practice
with the camera you have, and try to learn
| | 02:16 | exactly where your gear is deficient
before you bother investing in something new.
| | 02:20 | Now to follow along with this course,
you have to be comfortable with the
| | 02:24 | practice of metering.
| | 02:25 | Also, if you're not familiar with
terms like fast lens or high ISO or
| | 02:30 | priority mode, then you need to do a little
preparatory study before you head on from here.
| | 02:35 | Check out my Foundations of Photography:
| | 02:37 | Exposure course for more on the fundamentals
of exposure and my Foundations of Photography:
| | 02:42 | Lenses course for more about the
particulars of lens speed and auto focus and
| | 02:46 | focal length and those concepts.
| | 02:49 | For the most part, this is a course on
shooting in available light, even when
| | 02:53 | there's not very much of it.
| | 02:54 | While we will look at one or two flash
issues, this is not a course on lighting
| | 02:58 | or on using strobes.
| | 03:00 | This is a course about shooting in
available low light with the idea of getting
| | 03:04 | shots that look like they were shot in low light.
| | 03:06 | So don't worry about
investing in any lighting gear.
| | 03:09 | This is also a course that might
lead you outside late at night.
| | 03:12 | So depending on the weather where you are,
that might mean you need some foul weather gear.
| | 03:17 | If it's cold, you'll need something to
keep warm, like a stupid-looking hat, and
| | 03:21 | that won't impede your movement
or the control of your camera.
| | 03:25 | If it's wet, you'll need a way to stay dry
and you might need a raincoat for your camera.
| | 03:29 | The only other thing you need is
curiosity and a desire to explore a
| | 03:35 | different type of imaging,
| | 03:36 | a type of imaging where light behaves
differently from what you're used to, and
| | 03:40 | where your process of
shooting will most likely slow down.
| | 03:44 | It can take a while to make all of the
decisions required for low-light shooting.
| | 03:47 | So some of the things you're to learn
here may lead you to a very different
| | 03:52 | shooting practice from what you're used to.
| | 03:54 | Before we head off in the dark though,
we're going to spend some time reviewing
| | 03:57 | some fundamental concepts from the
point of view of a low-light shooter.
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2. Exposure ConsiderationsWorking with exposure parameters in low light| 00:02 | As light levels dim, your job as a
photographer gets a little more complicated.
| | 00:06 | However, if you're comfortable with
basic exposure theory, you should be okay.
| | 00:11 | There is nothing new that you need to
learn on your camera. There is no new
| | 00:15 | concepts that you need to add to
your understanding of exposure theory.
| | 00:18 | You still need to know about shutter
speed and aperture and ISO, and you need to
| | 00:23 | understand the compromises and trade-offs that
happen as you change any of these parameters.
| | 00:31 | Good exposure is always a balancing act.
| | 00:34 | On the one hand, you have a
creative vision that you might be trying to
| | 00:37 | achieve, but on the other hand, you need to think
about motion blur and depth of field and noise.
| | 00:42 | Well that's all true in low light,
but as the light in your scene dims, your
| | 00:47 | tolerances for acceptable shutter
speed and noise and aperture, those all get
| | 00:52 | smaller. In other words, when
shooting in low light your margin of error is
| | 00:56 | much less forgiving.
| | 00:58 | So in this chapter, we're going to
quickly go through all of your exposure
| | 01:01 | parameters and look at what your low-
light concerns will be with each one.
| | 01:05 | And if you're not already comfortable
with the basics of exposure, check out my
| | 01:09 | Foundations of Photography: Exposure course.
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| Working with image sensors in low light| 00:01 | So the story goes that one fall day,
two engineers at Bell Labs, George Smith
| | 00:07 | and Willard Boyle, spent about an hour
sketching out an idea for a new type of
| | 00:11 | semiconductor that could be used as computer
memory, you know, as one does on a nice fall day.
| | 00:17 | Anyway, they thought that the
semiconductor could also be used to create a video
| | 00:21 | camera that didn't require vacuum tubes.
| | 00:24 | In that hour, the two men created the plan
for the charged coupled device, or CCD chip.
| | 00:32 | Now, we tend to think of digital
cameras as a fairly new technology, but that
| | 00:36 | fall day that I am talking
about was in October of 1969.
| | 00:41 | Within a year, Bell Labs had created a video
camera using Smith and Boyle's new semiconductor.
| | 00:46 | Their idea was to create a very
simple device that could be used in a video
| | 00:49 | telephone, but they soon had created a
camera that was good enough for broadcast TV work.
| | 00:55 | It wasn't until the late 1990s though that
the quality from these image sensors had
| | 00:59 | gotten good enough for still
photography work. A still photo requires far more
| | 01:03 | pixels than a standard-definition video image.
| | 01:06 | Smith and Boyle's design exploited
something called the photoelectric effect,
| | 01:11 | which is a property that some metals have.
| | 01:13 | If you put an electrical charge on these
types of metals, they will release some
| | 01:17 | of that charge when they're exposed to light.
| | 01:20 | As more light hits the metal,
more charge gets released.
| | 01:23 | After the light exposure, you can
measure the charge that's left on the metal
| | 01:27 | and know how much light struck
the surface during the exposure.
| | 01:30 | This is what the sensor in your camera does.
| | 01:32 | There is a little piece of metal for
every pixel in the resulting image.
| | 01:36 | Each piece of metal is called a
photo site and after you take your shot, the
| | 01:40 | camera measures the voltage at each
photo site to determine the overall light levels.
| | 01:44 | Now these are very, very weak
voltages that we are talking about, so before
| | 01:49 | the image data from the chip can be
interpreted and processed, it needs to be amplified.
| | 01:54 | Once it's boosted up to a reasonable
level, the data can be processed into
| | 01:58 | a final color image.
| | 01:59 | Now when you increase the ISO on your
camera, all you're doing is turning up
| | 02:04 | that level of amplification.
And just as turning up the volume knob or
| | 02:08 | amplification on your stereo lets you
hear quieter sounds in the music that you
| | 02:13 | are listening to, turning up the ISO or
amplification on your image sensor lets
| | 02:18 | you see the lower light levels.
| | 02:20 | Now because the sensor becomes
effectively more responsive, it doesn't
| | 02:24 | require as long to gather a given
amount of light. This means that as a light
| | 02:28 | levels drop, if you raise the ISO on
your camera, you don't have to suffer
| | 02:33 | slower shutter speeds.
| | 02:34 | This can be critical for freezing
motion or preventing handheld shake.
| | 02:39 | Now there is a price to pay for this.
| | 02:42 | As you turn up the volume on your stereo,
you can hear more static and hiss in
| | 02:46 | the music that you are listening to,
because as you increase amplification, you
| | 02:49 | are not just increasing the recorded
music, you are also increasing all sorts of
| | 02:53 | electrical noise that's caused by the
circuitry in the hardware and cosmic rays
| | 02:58 | flying by and other
electrical fields in the area.
| | 03:00 | Same thing is true on your camera.
| | 03:02 | As you increase ISO, you amplify the
signal coming from the sensor, but you also
| | 03:07 | amplify any noise that has
found its way into the electronics.
| | 03:11 | This noise appears in your
image's speckly patterns.
| | 03:15 | There are three kinds of
noise that can appear in an image.
| | 03:18 | There is luminance noise. This is
simply changes and brightness from pixel to
| | 03:22 | pixel, and this noise appears roughly
akin to film grain. It can actually be
| | 03:26 | attractive because it can lend
texture and atmosphere to an image.
| | 03:30 | There is chromatic noise, or chrominance noise.
| | 03:32 | This is a change in color from
place to place in your image.
| | 03:36 | Chromatic noise can appear as colored
specks or even big colored splotches. It's
| | 03:40 | a pretty ugly kind of noise and it
looks more like a digital artifact than
| | 03:44 | luminance noise does.
| | 03:45 | Both of these types of noise
will get worse as you increase ISO.
| | 03:49 | Now there is a third type of noise that can
develop as your shutter speeds get longer.
| | 03:53 | With a longer shutter speed, the pixels
on the sensor can get stuck on, and end
| | 03:58 | up appearing as bright
specks in your final image.
| | 04:00 | This is referred to as stuck-pixel
noise or long-exposure noise. As we'll see
| | 04:05 | later, your camera might have built-
in features for dealing with this.
| | 04:09 | Noise is difficult to remove from a
final image and when you do employ a noise-
| | 04:14 | reduction process, you
usually suffer a sharpness penalty.
| | 04:17 | So as a low-light shooter--that is, as
somebody who shoots at high ISOs with long
| | 04:22 | shutter speeds--noise will be a major
concern for you, and we'll be looking in
| | 04:26 | detail at how to factor noise concerns
into your process when you're working
| | 04:31 | in low light.
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| Working with shutter speed in low light| 00:00 | Just as you cannot see as well in the
dark, your camera has a more difficult
| | 00:05 | time creating an image if
you don't have enough light.
| | 00:08 | Now, not enough light doesn't mean an
image that's completely dark. Long before
| | 00:12 | you get to full darkness,
| | 00:14 | you'll encounter the problem of a scene
that simply doesn't have enough light to
| | 00:17 | show a level of detail that
the viewer can make sense of.
| | 00:20 | Now you determine how bright or dark
your final images through your exposure
| | 00:25 | controls: shutter speed, aperture, ISO.
| | 00:28 | You should already be familiar
with these and how they interrelate.
| | 00:31 | But let's quickly review a
couple of critical low-light concerns.
| | 00:35 | As the shutter is open longer, moving
objects in your scene will get blurrier
| | 00:40 | and if you're shaking the camera at all,
overall sharpness in your image will
| | 00:44 | decrease, due to camera shake.
| | 00:47 | Of course, leaving the shutter open
longer is one of the ways that you can get
| | 00:50 | more light onto the sensor.
| | 00:51 | So in low light, you'll be battling
this balance of a shutter speed that's long
| | 00:56 | enough to get you to light that you
need but not so long that it introduces
| | 01:00 | unwanted motion blur or camera shake.
| | 01:03 | When you're shooting handheld, there's
a simple guideline that you can follow
| | 01:07 | to determine if your current shutter speed is
fast enough to prevent blur from camera shake.
| | 01:12 | Look at the focal length on
the lens that you're using.
| | 01:15 | So in this case right now,
I'm dialed to a 100 mm.
| | 01:19 | If my shutter speed is less than 1 over
that focal length, then I will run the
| | 01:24 | risk of a blurry image.
| | 01:25 | So in this case, if my shutter speed
drops below 1/100th of a second, I need to
| | 01:31 | be concerned about a soft image, just
because I might be shaking the camera.
| | 01:35 | Longer focal lengths needs a faster
shutter speed to prevent blur, because with a
| | 01:39 | longer focal length, you're cropping a
smaller area of the world. Then any small
| | 01:44 | camera motion become more pronounced.
| | 01:46 | In my case though, I'm using a
stabilized lens, one that offers three reliable
| | 01:50 | stops of stabilization.
| | 01:51 | Now remember, every stop
represents a doubling or halfing.
| | 01:55 | So, one stop down from 1/100th is 150.
| | 01:59 | A stop down from there is 1/25th,
and one down from there is one-twelfth--
| | 02:04 | that's three stops.
| | 02:05 | So if I'm careful, I can get a stable image
with this lens down to roughly 1/12 of a second.
| | 02:11 | I've got to say that the stabilizer on
these lenses actually claims four stops, but
| | 02:16 | just from experience using it, I'm not
comfortable taking that fourth stop down.
| | 02:21 | Now this rule is only about
addressing camera shake; it has no bearing on
| | 02:25 | objects in my scene that are moving. If I'm
shooting a dance performance in low light,
| | 02:29 | one twelfth of a second is going to
give me very blurry motion, and there's
| | 02:32 | nothing I can do about that, other
than to speed up the shutter speed.
| | 02:36 | But if I do that, I'll be cutting out more
light and then my image might be too dark.
| | 02:41 | These are the types of trade-offs that we
will be examining throughout this course.
| | 02:45 | To get the most from these lessons,
you need to understand how to control the
| | 02:48 | shutter speed on your camera.
| | 02:50 | It would be best if you knew how to
use your camera's program shift feature--
| | 02:54 | some manufacturers call that flexible
program--as well as exposure compensation,
| | 02:58 | aperture, and shutter priority, and manual mode.
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| Considering motion blur| 00:01 | As we shoot throughout the rest of
this course, we're going to be constantly
| | 00:04 | fighting the problem of motion blur.
| | 00:06 | Most often it's the one factor
that you will base all of your other
| | 00:08 | exposure decisions around.
| | 00:10 | Now, while you usually never want camera shake in
an image, motion blur can be a different story.
| | 00:15 | Sometimes letting a moving object in
your scenes smear out to blurry creates a
| | 00:20 | much more interesting,
compelling, and dynamic image.
| | 00:24 | In fact, sometimes you need motion blur
for the viewer to be able to understand
| | 00:28 | what the action in the scene is.
| | 00:30 | So when you're facing a moving subject,
one of your first decisions is the
| | 00:34 | creative choice of whether or not the
motion in the scene should be blurred or
| | 00:38 | frozen, and this is true no matter
what type of light you're shooting in.
| | 00:41 | In low light though, you'll encounter
motion blur far more often, simply because
| | 00:46 | dim lighting will force
you to slower shutter speeds.
| | 00:49 | In some cases, you won't be able to
raise your shutter speed enough to freeze
| | 00:52 | the motion, either because you can't
get your ISO high enough or because your
| | 00:56 | subject is moving too fast.
| | 00:58 | Rather than giving up, take the shot
anyway. Try experimenting with what you
| | 01:02 | can do with the blur.
| | 01:03 | Now obviously you'll have to change
your expectations from a sharp, detailed
| | 01:07 | image, but having some experience
with how blur can be used effectively can
| | 01:11 | greatly expand your creative palette.
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| Working with ISO in low light| 00:01 | At the beginning of this chapter,
we explored a technical definition of ISO and
| | 00:05 | saw what happens inside your camera
when you increase your ISO setting.
| | 00:09 | Let's look now at some practical ISO concerns.
| | 00:12 | When you meter, your camera
measures the light in your scene and then
| | 00:16 | calculate the shutter speed and
aperture combination that should yield an image
| | 00:20 | with good overall brightness.
| | 00:22 | But then shows you these parameters in its
viewfinder, once it's got them all locked in.
| | 00:27 | At that point, you must take note of
shutter speed and assess whether it's fast
| | 00:31 | enough to handle motion, the way that
you want, as well as being fast enough to
| | 00:36 | prevent camera shake.
| | 00:37 | If shutter speed is too low then your best
option is to raise the ISO on your camera.
| | 00:42 | Now, doubling the ISO setting will
result in your shutter speed being cut in
| | 00:47 | half, that is, if you increase ISO by
one stop, then your shutter speed will
| | 00:52 | decrease by one stop.
| | 00:53 | It should be fairly intuitive. If the
sensor is twice as sensitive to light, it
| | 00:58 | can gather twice as much
in the same amount of time.
| | 01:01 | This means you only need half the
shutter speed to gather the same amount of
| | 01:04 | light that you were
collecting before you changed ISO.
| | 01:07 | So raising ISO lets you speed up your
shutter speed, and that gives you more
| | 01:13 | motion-stopping power.
| | 01:15 | To make it to the rest of this course,
it's imperative that you understand where
| | 01:19 | the ISO control is on your camera.
| | 01:22 | Older cameras let you adjust ISO in
whole-stop increments. So they might start
| | 01:26 | a low ISO of, say, 100 and let you go up in
full stops, 100 to 200 to 400 to 800, and so on.
| | 01:34 | Newer cameras typically default altering
ISO in one-third or one-half stop increments.
| | 01:40 | So you might get ISOs that go
from 100 to 125 to 160 to 200.
| | 01:46 | In this course, you will see that my
ISO settings move in whole stops because I
| | 01:50 | changed my camera's default behavior
from one-third stops to whole stops.
| | 01:55 | For low-light shooting, I don't
typically find that the finer degree of ISO
| | 01:59 | control really makes that much
difference, and I like being able to think in
| | 02:02 | terms of whole stops when I am altering
ISO. Check your camera's manual to see
| | 02:06 | if you can change your ISO increment.
| | 02:08 | Now unfortunately, you can't just go
changing your ISO willy-nilly, because of
| | 02:12 | the issue of noise, which we
discussed at the beginning of this chapter.
| | 02:17 | Therefore, to more intelligently use
your particular camera's ISO, you need to
| | 02:22 | better understand its specific ISO
capabilities, and will be looking at how to
| | 02:26 | do that in the next lesson.
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| Assessing your camera's high ISO capability| 00:01 | As you should know by now, as you
increase ISO, you also increase the amount of
| | 00:06 | noise in your image.
| | 00:07 | This means you can't just
necessarily crank the ISO up until you get your
| | 00:11 | shutter speed down to where you want it.
| | 00:13 | If you do, you may end up with an
unacceptable amount of ugly noise in your image.
| | 00:18 | Fortunately, these days, most new
cameras offer very good noise response.
| | 00:22 | On my SLR, for example, I can go all
the way up to ISO 400 with no perceptible
| | 00:27 | increase in noise, and I regularly
shoot all the way up to ISO 3200 without
| | 00:31 | worrying about
unacceptable noise in my final shots.
| | 00:34 | Beyond that though, I find that my
images simply get too grainy and noisy,
| | 00:39 | so I only use ISOs higher than 3200
when I absolutely have no other choice,
| | 00:45 | and I alter my expectations to
assume that the images that I get will be
| | 00:49 | compromised by noise.
| | 00:51 | If all I am trying to do is document
something then that's not a problem, but if
| | 00:54 | I am going for a high-quality fine-art
level of output, then I know that I will
| | 00:58 | probably be disappointed above ISO 3200.
| | 01:01 | Before you go out shooting, therefore,
it's a good idea to have an understanding
| | 01:05 | of how high you can push ISO on your
specific camera before you get a noise
| | 01:10 | level that's not acceptable for the
work that you are doing, and that's
| | 01:13 | something you can easily
determine with a few simple tests.
| | 01:17 | You can do this anywhere in your house.
| | 01:19 | I had some flowers delivered. I've got
them set up here just in a normal room. I
| | 01:23 | have got kind of a moderate amount of lighting.
| | 01:26 | What I am going to do is just take
some pictures of these flowers at
| | 01:29 | different ISO settings.
| | 01:30 | I am going to take the same frame
at all of my ISO settings, actually.
| | 01:34 | So I am starting out here at ISO 100.
| | 01:36 | I have got my camera set at aperture
priority because I want as much depth of
| | 01:40 | field as I can get. I dialed into about f/9.
| | 01:43 | That's going to give me a pretty
slow shutter speed at this light level.
| | 01:47 | So I am going to take that shot.
| | 01:48 | It's about 3 seconds. And I am just
going to crank my ISO up to 200, the next
| | 01:53 | stop, and I am going to
shoot the same shot again.
| | 01:56 | So nothing fancy about my setup here.
| | 01:57 | I am just on a tripod and again, I am
just chosen an object. It doesn't have to
| | 02:00 | be flowers, although these are very nice.
| | 02:02 | And I am just trying to get shots at
all my ISOs so that I can go look at them
| | 02:07 | later and see how bad the noise gets.
| | 02:09 | So here I am up to ISO 400.
That's down to half a second.
| | 02:13 | When I get done with this, what I am
going to do is lower the light in the room.
| | 02:17 | You are going to be shooting in
lots of different levels of low light.
| | 02:20 | Some are going to be levels that are
actually pretty reasonable for your own
| | 02:23 | eyes, a little rougher for your camera;
| | 02:25 | others are going to be darker than
what your eyes can see, but your camera is
| | 02:28 | going to be able to pick up stuff.
| | 02:29 | So you want to, after you shoot this set,
turn down the light in the scene and
| | 02:35 | do the exact same set again. Same shots,
same ISO settings, and run through all
| | 02:39 | of those combinations.
| | 02:41 | When you get all done, then
it's time to assess the results.
| | 02:54 | This next bits pretty easy; all you
got to do is get your images into your
| | 02:57 | computer and look at them.
| | 02:59 | So to do that, you need an image
browser or an image editor that will let you
| | 03:02 | see your images at 100%, and that will
provide you with an EXIF display so that
| | 03:08 | you can see exactly what ISO
you were using with each shot.
| | 03:11 | Now you might also need a printer,
because to accurately assess your camera's
| | 03:18 | noise response, you want to be
evaluating your images in whatever form that you
| | 03:22 | will ultimately be outputting them in.
| | 03:23 | The thing is, an image from your camera
has millions of pixels, megapixels, and
| | 03:29 | if you were to take any one individual
pixel and print it out, it would be invisible.
| | 03:34 | They are so small by themselves
that they're almost irrelevant.
| | 03:37 | So it doesn't make a lot of sense to, on
my monitor, zoom into 100% and really
| | 03:42 | worry about each and every pixel.
| | 03:44 | What I want to do is get my test
images out in the way that I will ultimately
| | 03:49 | be delivering them.
| | 03:50 | If that's print, then I want to print them
out at the size that I expect to deliver them.
| | 03:54 | If I'm going to be sizing them to a
particular size and posting them on the web,
| | 03:58 | then I want to look at them that way.
| | 03:59 | That will give me a more accurate
assessment of whether noise is really a
| | 04:04 | problem in the way that I
intend to output my pictures.
| | 04:07 | As far as doing the actual assessment,
I tend to just open my images up, print
| | 04:12 | them, or get them the sized the way that
I want onscreen, and then look at each
| | 04:16 | image that I shot at each ISO.
| | 04:19 | Noise is a really subjective thing.
| | 04:21 | What is acceptable to you
may not be to somebody else.
| | 04:25 | It's up to you to decide if
an image is too noisy or not.
| | 04:28 | Look for luminance noise--those are
the bright speckly kinds of noise;
| | 04:31 | chrominance noise, those are the color swatches;
| | 04:34 | and stuck pixel noise, those are
going to be individual little white spots.
| | 04:38 | If you decide that at a particular ISO,
boy, that's just too crunchy and noisy, I
| | 04:42 | don't like it, then you know that
that's not an ISO that you want to go to when
| | 04:46 | you're out in the field.
| | 04:47 | So try to identify that upper
level of ISO that you're comfortable
| | 04:51 | shooting with.
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| Working with in-camera noise reduction| 00:01 | Noise is enough of a problem that a lot
of software developers have spent a lot
| | 00:04 | of time trying to figure out how to
reduce noise on an image in post-production.
| | 00:09 | There's been a lot of good work done
in that regard, and we'll look at some of
| | 00:12 | those options later, but your camera
also probably offers some noise-reduction
| | 00:16 | options that can be extremely helpful.
| | 00:19 | You're going to need to do a little
research, dig into your camera's manual, and
| | 00:22 | see what noise-reduction
features it has that you can turn on.
| | 00:25 | You might see something
called high ISO noise reduction.
| | 00:29 | This is a special noise reduction
routine that kicks in when you raise ISO
| | 00:34 | above a certain point.
| | 00:36 | On newer cameras, high ISO Reduction
defaults to being turned on, and it works
| | 00:40 | very, very well.
You probably want to leave it on.
| | 00:43 | On some Canon cameras, you actually
have different levels of noise reduction
| | 00:47 | that you can activate in the
high ISO noise-reduction feature.
| | 00:50 | So you might want to try those and
experiment with them and see what you think
| | 00:53 | about their results.
| | 00:54 | Any noise reduction routine, whether
it's in your camera or in your computer, is
| | 00:59 | a balance between noise
reduction and softening of the image.
| | 01:02 | So that's what you're looking for
when you're evaluating these noise-
| | 01:05 | reduction features.
| | 01:07 | Now you might also see something
called long exposure noise reduction
| | 01:10 | or something similar.
| | 01:12 | That's meant to take out some of that
stuck pixel noise that we talked about
| | 01:15 | earlier, the kind of thing that happens
during long exposures when the sensor is
| | 01:19 | left turned on for a long time.
| | 01:21 | Long exposure noise reduction is
interesting because sometimes if it's turned
| | 01:25 | on, it means that your camera will
take as long as the exposure to perform a
| | 01:31 | noise-reduction process.
| | 01:33 | So if you're doing a 30-second exposure,
after the shutter closes, the camera is
| | 01:37 | going to sit there for another 30
seconds and do its noise-reduction process.
| | 01:41 | On some newer cameras, it happens in real
time and so you don't have to worry about that.
| | 01:46 | That's something you know about
your camera before you start using that
| | 01:48 | feature, because if you need to be
working quickly, obviously, that's going to
| | 01:51 | be a bit of a problem.
| | 01:52 | Get out your manual, look for those
two features, see if they have multiple
| | 01:56 | settings, do some experiments, test them,
it's good to know how those work
| | 02:00 | if you want to use them
once you're out in the field.
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| Working with aperture in low light| 00:00 | There is, of course, a third
exposure parameter, and that's aperture.
| | 00:04 | As you open the aperture in your lens,
more light and pass through the lens to the
| | 00:08 | sensor during an exposure. Different
lenses have different maximum apertures.
| | 00:13 | For example, one 50 mm lens might only
be able to open to an aperture of f/3.5,
| | 00:18 | while another might be able to open all
the way to f/1.2. Remember, the lower the
| | 00:22 | number, the wider the aperture.
| | 00:24 | With a wider aperture, you don't
need as long of an exposure to capture a
| | 00:28 | given amount of light.
| | 00:29 | In other words, a lens with a really
wide maximum aperture will let you keep
| | 00:34 | your shutter speeds faster
when you're shooting in low light.
| | 00:38 | Now the maximum aperture of a lens
is referred to as the speed of a lens.
| | 00:41 | So a lens with a maximum aperture of
f/2 is referred to as an f/2 lens, and
| | 00:46 | that's generally
considered to be a very speedy lens.
| | 00:49 | Creating a lens with a wide
maximum aperture requires a lot of glass,
| | 00:53 | so fast lenses are usually physically
larger and therefore more expensive, and
| | 00:57 | they're also heavier.
| | 00:58 | Obviously, for low-light
shooting, a fast lens is great
| | 01:02 | because the wider aperture helps
you keep your shutter speed faster.
| | 01:05 | If you're going to back country though,
faster lenses might be prohibitively
| | 01:08 | weighty, so you'll need to consider that.
| | 01:11 | Of course, as aperture gets wider, the
depth of field in your scene gets shallower,
| | 01:15 | so you'll need to factor depth of
field needs into the equation as well.
| | 01:18 | Now if you're using a zoom lens, you
may not have the same maximum aperture
| | 01:23 | across the entire zoom range.
| | 01:24 | For example, a lens on this camera has
a maximum aperture of f/3.5 when I'm at
| | 01:30 | the widest or shortest focal length and
f/5.6 when I am zoomed in all the way to
| | 01:36 | the longest focal length, and it
varies somewhere between those two.
| | 01:40 | So, if you need a faster aperture with
a lens like this, than you might want to
| | 01:44 | consider standing in a different
location and using a different focal length.
| | 01:48 | Now, of course, if you do that, the
sense of depth in your scene will change.
| | 01:52 | So along with motion blur and noise
concerns, these are other factors that we're
| | 01:56 | going to be considering and
balancing while working in low light.
| | 02:00 | If all of this is a complete mystery to
you, if this is not review, then take a
| | 02:04 | look at Foundations of Photography:
| | 02:05 | Lenses, which details all of these lens
issues that we're talking about here.
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| Understanding dynamic range| 00:01 | In photography, the measure of the
darkest to lightest tones that your camera
| | 00:05 | can capture is referred to as the dynamic range.
| | 00:08 | Now you may think that low-light
shooting is inherently a low-dynamic-range
| | 00:12 | situation: Everything is dark, right?
| | 00:14 | But actually, low-light situations often
have a very high dynamic range, because
| | 00:18 | you'll have a dark scene and
usually have bright light in it somewhere.
| | 00:23 | The important thing to remember about
dynamic range is that your eye has a much
| | 00:27 | higher dynamic range than your camera,
probably close to twice the range.
| | 00:30 | So, while you're standing there, you're
going to be able to see detail around the
| | 00:34 | bright light and in dark shadows.
| | 00:37 | Your camera though won't be able to
see that full range without using a
| | 00:40 | very long shutter speed.
| | 00:42 | Typically, the camera will meter
for the bright thing; in other words,
| | 00:45 | it'll decide to go with shorter shutter
speeds and smaller apertures so that the
| | 00:49 | bright thing doesn't overexpose.
But that means that shadowy areas will most
| | 00:54 | likely be plunged into complete darkness.
| | 00:56 | So, there are two things to keep in mind.
| | 00:58 | First your camera will require a very
long shutter speed to capture the level of
| | 01:03 | detail that your eye can see, and second,
you may have to overexpose some bright
| | 01:08 | highlights to be able to get the
detail that you want in your shadows.
| | 01:11 | Finally, know that if you use a long
shutter speed, your camera will be able to
| | 01:15 | capture a level of detail
that your eye cannot see.
| | 01:18 | So, part of being a good low-light
shooters understanding that there may be a
| | 01:22 | picture hidden in the darkness, one
that your eyes can't see but that you can
| | 01:26 | coax out with your camera.
| | 01:28 | This is a skill that will come with
experience, as you learn more about what your
| | 01:31 | camera can do in low light with long exposures.
| | 01:34 | As a photographer, it's very important
for you to understand the relationship
| | 01:37 | between your eyes' dynamic range
and your camera's dynamic range.
| | 01:41 | No matter what type of light you're shooting,
| | 01:43 | the easiest way to learn this is
simply to pay attention. When you at our
| | 01:47 | finished image, try to remember what
was visible to your eye. Or if you're still
| | 01:51 | at the scene, compare what your eye
can see to what your camera has captured.
| | 01:55 | Overtime you'll develop a sense for when
you might need to expose in a different
| | 01:58 | way to capture what you perceive with your eyes.
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| Working with color temperature and white balance| 00:01 | Color can be tricky in low light.
| | 00:03 | Your eyes, of course, lose the ability
to perceive color as light levels drop.
| | 00:07 | Given a long enough exposure, your
camera can pick out color details that
| | 00:11 | are invisible to your eye, but getting
accurate color in low light requires some work.
| | 00:16 | Most of the time, you'll find that your
low-light images shift to having a very
| | 00:21 | warm orange or reddish cast.
| | 00:23 | This is because the camera is not
accurately white balancing for the available light.
| | 00:27 | White balance is the process of
calibrating your camera for the type of light
| | 00:31 | that you're shooting in, so
that colors appear accurate.
| | 00:34 | In low light, it's very difficult for
your camera's auto white balance mechanism
| | 00:38 | to get an accurate white balance.
| | 00:40 | If correct color is important to
your shot, then you'll need to take some
| | 00:44 | additional white balance action.
| | 00:46 | You'll need to either manually white
balance or you'll need to shoot RAW so that
| | 00:50 | you can alter the white balance later.
| | 00:52 | If you choose to shoot RAW, I recommend
using a white balance card so that you
| | 00:56 | can have a good record of an actual
gray tone, which you can use later for your
| | 01:00 | white-balance adjustment.
| | 01:01 | We'll be looking at how to use all
of these techniques at various times
| | 01:04 | throughout this course.
| | 01:05 | So if you've been frustrated that
your low-light images always look red or
| | 01:08 | orange, don't worry; we're going to fix that.
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| Exposing to the right| 00:01 | There's a certain amount of light in this
room right now that's illuminating me this much.
| | 00:05 | If we double the amount of light, if
we bring them twice as many of the exact
| | 00:08 | same kind of lights and turn them all on,
our eyes will not actually register a
| | 00:13 | doubling of illumination.
| | 00:14 | Our senses don't work that way.
All of our senses are that way.
| | 00:17 | If I hand you a bowling ball and then
hand you another bowling ball, you don't
| | 00:20 | actually perceive a doubling in weight.
| | 00:22 | Our senses are nonlinear;
| | 00:24 | they actually look on a logarithmic scale.
| | 00:26 | Film is the same way.
| | 00:27 | If you double the amount of light in
a scene, you don't get a doubling of
| | 00:31 | illumination when you're shooting film.
| | 00:33 | Your digital camera, though, is different;
| | 00:34 | it employs a linear capture system.
| | 00:38 | What that means, practically, is that when
you're working in low light there is an
| | 00:42 | exposure strategy that you can
employ that may help you keep noise down.
| | 00:47 | Here is how it works.
| | 00:49 | There are a certain number of levels of
brightness that your camera can capture.
| | 00:52 | Say it can capture 4000 levels of brightness.
| | 00:56 | Half of those levels go into
representing the brightest stop in your scene. In
| | 01:02 | other words 2000 of those 4000
available shades of gray that it has go into
| | 01:07 | just the brightest stop.
| | 01:09 | Half of what's left over from that
remaining 2000 go into the next brightest stop,
| | 01:14 | half of what's left over from that
into the next, and so on and so forth.
| | 01:17 | What that means is when you get down
to the darkest tones in your image, they
| | 01:21 | may only be represented by four or eight
shades of gray, or four or eight tones or values.
| | 01:28 | So in other words, your camera is
really good at capturing bright things but
| | 01:33 | not so good at capturing dark things.
Most of the time this doesn't matter.
| | 01:37 | Most of the time your RAW converter
does a fine job of equalizing everything
| | 01:41 | and evening everything out.
| | 01:43 | If you're working in low light though,
underexposing or capturing lots of dark
| | 01:48 | stuff, it means you're putting all of
your data into those lower stops where the
| | 01:51 | camera simply doesn't
store that much information.
| | 01:54 | You're not really playing
to the camera strengths.
| | 01:57 | Very often, therefore, when you're
working in extremely low light, if you
| | 02:01 | overexpose your image--not overexposed
to the point of blowing your highlights
| | 02:05 | out beyond recovery, but exposing so
that all of the data in your image is more
| | 02:09 | to the right of the histogram--then
you've got a really data-rich area that you
| | 02:14 | can push down into the shadow areas.
| | 02:16 | In other words, you can darken
your image in post-processing,
| | 02:19 | push all of that data down into the
shadow areas, and end up with shadows that
| | 02:22 | are possibly less noisy than
if you had exposed normally.
| | 02:26 | Let me give you an example. I can't
show you the full noise response here
| | 02:30 | because it's very difficult to
represent that on a small screen, but here's a
| | 02:35 | case where I did come in and
change my exposure strategy.
| | 02:38 | This was my initial exposure as I
calculated it, based on the camera's metering,
| | 02:42 | and you can see all of my tones are
clustered here at the left end of the
| | 02:46 | histogram, but the really value-rich
tones would be over here on the your right
| | 02:50 | end of the histogram.
| | 02:52 | By cranking up my exposure, I can
capture data into the brighter areas of the
| | 02:57 | histogram, and here you
can see, I went up to here.
| | 03:00 | Now really, to have done this right, I
should have exposed even more, cranked up
| | 03:04 | my exposure more, so that more tones
come all the way over here. But I'll be
| | 03:07 | honest with you, it was really
cold there and I wanted to go home.
| | 03:10 | Now I'm always running the threat of
overexposing bright highlights in my image,
| | 03:15 | but if I remember that I've got
highlight recovery capability built into my RAW
| | 03:20 | conversion, I can push all the way over
into having a little bit of spike over
| | 03:24 | here and be able to recover that and
really darken my data back down into those
| | 03:29 | shadow areas and greatly reduce noise.
| | 03:32 | This means that out of the camera,
my images are going to look awful.
| | 03:34 | They are all going to look way too
bright, they're going to be overexposed,
| | 03:38 | possibly have lost some highlight
detail, but once I start processing them,
| | 03:41 | they're going to really firm up and
possibly exhibit much cleaner shadows.
| | 03:48 | We're going to be exposing this way on
some of our shots so you're going to get
| | 03:51 | a little more experience with how this
works and how to use the histogram on the
| | 03:55 | back of your camera to keep
track of this while you're working.
| | 03:58 | Later, we'll process some of these images.
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|
|
3. Scenario: A Dinner PartyIntroduction| 00:01 | It's easy to think of low-light shooting
as something that happens only at night,
| | 00:04 | and there's a good reason for thinking that way.
| | 00:06 | It's usually awfully dark at night.
| | 00:08 | But low-light situations can happen
at any time of the day and in lots of
| | 00:13 | different locales and situations.
| | 00:15 | In fact, most of your low-light
shooting will probably be during the daytime, as
| | 00:19 | you battle difficult
lighting situations indoors.
| | 00:22 | For example, a European vacation
might take you inside dark cathedrals or
| | 00:27 | marketplaces. Or maybe you want a shoot
event in your office during the daytime.
| | 00:31 | These are all low-light
situations most of the time.
| | 00:35 | Indoor low light doesn't require a
different skill set than outdoor low light;
| | 00:40 | you still need to answer the same
questions and solve the same problems that you
| | 00:43 | face when you're shooting in low light outside.
| | 00:46 | One of the great things about indoor
low light though is that you can easily find
| | 00:50 | low-light problems in your own home,
| | 00:52 | so it's simple to practice dealing with them.
| | 00:55 | I've invited a bunch of friends over for
dinner tonight and I'm going to shoot the event.
| | 00:59 | It will be nighttime and we're going
to want some atmosphere in the room,
| | 01:01 | so we'll have the lights down low.
| | 01:04 | This is the type of low-light situation
that you might encounter anytime you
| | 01:07 | have a family gathering or special
occasion, and we're going to spend this whole
| | 01:11 | chapter exploring how to get good shots.
| | 01:13 | Now I've also invited my friend
Steve Simon, a Canadian photographer
| | 01:17 | and photojournalist.
| | 01:18 | If you've seen my Foundations of
Photography: Composition course, then you've
| | 01:21 | already seen some of Steve's work.
| | 01:23 | Now you're going to get to hear his
take on how he handles tricky low-light
| | 01:27 | situations. But before we get to that,
I'm going to sit down with Steve and
| | 01:31 | look at some of his low-light images
and talk about what problems he faced and
| | 01:34 | how he solved them.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Talking with Steve Simon about low-light photography| 00:00 | I am here with my friend and
photographer, Steve Simon, veteran photojournalist
| | 00:04 | and all-around great guy.
| | 00:06 | Steve, I say veteran photographer; it
makes it sound like you have been out
| | 00:09 | there under fire, shooting.
| | 00:10 | Steve Simon: Not so much, but I have been
doing this a long time and I love it.
| | 00:14 | There is nothing I would rather be doing.
| | 00:15 | Ben: You have been doing this a long time.
| | 00:18 | And one of things that's really
changed over the course of your career is the
| | 00:21 | ability to shoot in low light.
| | 00:23 | Steve: No question! I think we've been in a
golden era of photography.
| | 00:26 | I mean now with digital photography
and the sensors that we have now, there's
| | 00:31 | really nothing that can't
be recorded and photographed.
| | 00:35 | So it's an amazing opportunity for us
to work with the available light that's
| | 00:41 | out there and really capture reality in a way
that we weren't really able to do before this.
| | 00:48 | Ben: So as the noise-responsive sensors have
gotten better and their sensitivity has
| | 00:53 | gotten better, their ability to pull
more detail out of less light, has that
| | 00:57 | changed the way you see?
| | 00:58 | Has it changed your eye?
| | 00:59 | Steve: Absolutely! Sometimes when I go into a low-light
situation, I can't really predict exactly
| | 01:06 | what it's going to be.
| | 01:07 | Now it's getting better with practice,
but I'll sometimes go into a very dark
| | 01:12 | situation at a very high ISO, take an
image, and be somewhat astounded when I
| | 01:17 | look at the review screen and see
what actually has been captured.
| | 01:20 | It makes me realize that often it's
best not to interrupt the available ambient
| | 01:25 | light by using flash.
| | 01:27 | Flash become something more for
bright light, to fill in shadows, et cetera.
| | 01:31 | Let the available light dominate,
capture what's in front of you.
| | 01:34 | Ben: That's a very food tip.
| | 01:35 | We are going to take a look at
some of your images.
| | 01:37 | Steve: Sure.
Ben: Let's start with this one.
| | 01:38 | Ben: Now before we go to the actual specifics
of capturing this image in low light, I
| | 01:44 | want to just find out what's going on.
This is an intense picture.
| | 01:46 | Steve: Yeah, I was working in Lesotho, which is
a small country within South Africa. And
| | 01:52 | it was at a bar and I was working on a
project that had to do with HIV and AIDS.
| | 01:56 | So I wanted to kind of be in a
situation where there was social activity
| | 02:01 | happening and that was at a bar.
| | 02:03 | And I was leaving the bar, and this
person was there, and he was a little bit
| | 02:08 | drunk, and wasn't really sure that he
was comfortable with me and a camera.
| | 02:14 | So I just took one frame and then I left.
| | 02:18 | And it was okay. I mean it's just that
when people are drinking, all bets are off.
| | 02:22 | You don't know how they are going to react.
| | 02:24 | Ben: So had you been shooting up
to this point?
| | 02:27 | Steve: I had been shooting inside
the bar, and I was just leaving.
| | 02:29 | And you know sometimes you think the
shot is where you're putting your energy,
| | 02:34 | which was inside the bar, but I can
tell you that this was the shot ultimately
| | 02:38 | that I used. And it was just one quick
grab frame in low light and I got it.
| | 02:44 | Ben: What did he do after you
took the picture?
| | 02:45 | Steve: Nothing really, I mean he just
kind of looked at me like this.
| | 02:49 | I'm not sure exactly what he was thinking.
| | 02:52 | But in the end, it was okay, and you
can see one of his friends is kind of
| | 02:55 | holding him back because I guess they
don't even know what he is thinking or
| | 02:59 | what he wants to do. But it was okay.
| | 03:01 | Ben: So you had already been shooting in a dark bar.
| | 03:03 | You probably were already had your
ISO up on your camera. You probably
| | 03:06 | already thinking low light.
| | 03:08 | Steve: I was, I was.
| | 03:10 | Yeah, I mean when I'm in that situation,
of course you want to capture life as
| | 03:14 | it happens, and to introduce any kind of
supplementary light like flash is going
| | 03:18 | to really kill the ambience and mood
of what it is you're trying to capture.
| | 03:23 | So it's not a question of quantity of light;
| | 03:25 | it's really quality of light.
| | 03:27 | And if it's a low available light, but
the quality is fairly even and nice, you
| | 03:32 | are going to get extraordinary results.
| | 03:33 | You can't be afraid to ramp up the ISO
these days, because the image capture at
| | 03:39 | high ISO is phenomenal.
| | 03:41 | Ben: And this is not a situation
that one would normally think,
| | 03:44 | oh, I am going to go hang out in
this dingy area behind this bar and get
| | 03:47 | some good pictures. But even just this one
strong light here is giving you nice contrast.
| | 03:53 | Like you say it, ends up being a very
nice lighting situation.
| | 03:56 | Steve: Yeah, the trick is I think to be kind
of ready for anything and by that I mean
| | 04:00 | simplify your photographic process so
that when you encounter something that's
| | 04:04 | fleeting, you don't have to hesitate
and you have done it before, so you can
| | 04:07 | just nail it first time.
| | 04:10 | Ben: Great! Let's move on here.
Plainly indoors.
| | 04:15 | Steve: Yes, this was an indoor shot,
| | 04:17 | actually shot, if I recall, at 3200 ISO.
| | 04:22 | It's low light, but it's daylight.
And different sources of light are going to
| | 04:26 | react differently on the center.
And in my experience, daylight low light is
| | 04:31 | probably one of the best kinds of
low-light shooting in the sense that the noise
| | 04:38 | that does show up is often muted a
little bit and depending on what your final
| | 04:43 | output is, like a print, you don't really see it.
| | 04:46 | Now you can certain pixel peep in the
computer, and you'll notice stuff, but by
| | 04:50 | the time you post it to your web site or
actually make a big beautiful print, the
| | 04:55 | noise is not evident.
| | 04:56 | That's not an issue.
| | 04:57 | Ben: Yeah and this is blown up a lot and
looking at it up close, you would never
| | 05:01 | think this is a noisy image.
| | 05:03 | There is nothing
distracting in there, noise-wise.
| | 05:06 | It looks to me that in this scene
you had identified--looking at the light
| | 05:10 | here on the walls in the background,
it looks like it was probably a really
| | 05:12 | pretty diffuse low light.
| | 05:15 | Steve: It was, it was. It was coming in from an
opening in the door of this woman's house, and
| | 05:21 | this is her grandson, and
we are doing some portraits.
| | 05:25 | And the light on them was a little
bit brighter than the background,
| | 05:29 | so they're very well lit and though they
are very dark skinned, you can see that
| | 05:35 | the highlights really kind of draws your
attention in, and this part being out of
| | 05:40 | focus by using a wide aperture,
| | 05:43 | shows a bit of the ambience.
You get a sense that there's kind of a rock kind
| | 05:49 | of background, but it's out of focus,
| | 05:52 | so your attention stays on where
you want it as a photographer, which is
| | 05:56 | these beautiful people.
| | 05:57 | Ben: So you moved them into this part of the
room and positioned with them?
| | 06:01 | Steve: Yeah. You know when you are doing--I tend
to be more of a documentary photographer.
| | 06:05 | I like to capture life as
it exists and as it happens.
| | 06:09 | But it's obvious when you have someone
looking at the camera that it's no longer
| | 06:14 | necessarily a candid snapshot.
| | 06:16 | This is a session where they've
agreed to let you photograph them.
| | 06:21 | So in this instance, in the situation,
you look around for maybe an available
| | 06:26 | light situation, the most even light.
| | 06:28 | It doesn't have to be the brightest
area, but just maybe the most even, the
| | 06:31 | most diffuse light.
| | 06:33 | And ramp up the ISO as high as you need
to maintain a fast enough shutter speed
| | 06:38 | so you don't have any movement, and once
you're there, then you can kind of work
| | 06:43 | the scene a little bit, take a few
different pictures, and maybe talk to them
| | 06:46 | and try some different stuff.
| | 06:48 | Ben: I think that's a good lesson for
low-light shooting is that you might walk into
| | 06:51 | a dark or low-light environment, but
there still might be some places that are
| | 06:55 | brighter than others, and those are
the areas where maybe you can work with
| | 06:58 | Ben: something and make it happen.
Steve: True, true.
| | 07:01 | Ben: This scene has a little more dynamic
range than the last one, with these bright areas
| | 07:05 | scattered around.
Beautiful lighting though.
| | 07:07 | Steve: Yeah, it is. I mean you've got this
beautiful light coming from up above, and
| | 07:11 | it's illuminating this woman and her grandchild.
| | 07:15 | And with available light shooting
like this, I'm not afraid to lose detail
| | 07:20 | in the deep shadows.
| | 07:21 | As a matter fact, in many ways, having
the contrast, or having dark black areas
| | 07:28 | can actually really enhance the photo,
because it creates a little bit more
| | 07:32 | drama. And your eyes tend
to go to the lighted areas,
| | 07:36 | so when you have your main subject,
you want to be able to make sure that
| | 07:40 | there's enough light or enough
highlight falling on them so that your eye will
| | 07:45 | go to them as they are
very important in the scene.
| | 07:47 | Ben: I am glad you brought that up, actually. One of
the things that I think is interesting as we go through
| | 07:51 | the rest of these pictures is seeing how
much just full-on black you use in your images.
| | 07:56 | This one, again, you are working
with light the way that you have been
| | 07:59 | describing. Very shallow depth of
field in this image, which is something that
| | 08:03 | very often happens when we are
shooting in low light, because our apertures
| | 08:05 | have to go so wide.
| | 08:06 | You really made it work to
your advantage here.
| | 08:08 | Steve: Yeah, that's true.
| | 08:09 | Sometimes I like to use shallow depth
of field and have like this child in the
| | 08:14 | foreground, but out of focus.
| | 08:16 | It's amazing to me, as a
photographer, and I'm sure you agree with this,
| | 08:19 | that something can be completely out of
focus within the frame, yet it reads instantly.
| | 08:25 | You see it, you fill in the blanks.
You don't have to have everything in focus.
| | 08:29 | And in many ways, it create some more
dynamic image by having one main center of
| | 08:34 | focus, and that's why we pay a lot of
money for those fast lenses and use them
| | 08:38 | wide open because we want to--you
have something sharp or someone sharp in
| | 08:42 | the frame, your eye tends to go there
and you see everything, but you tend to go
| | 08:46 | to both the lighted areas and the focused area.
| | 08:50 | Now remember, in this situation, you
asked earlier if I would have someone
| | 08:53 | move. I remember coming in and this is
kind of where they were so there is one of
| | 08:58 | those rare times where I
didn't really do anything.
| | 09:01 | I just started to shoot, and I
started to shoot, and that was it.
| | 09:04 | It's not perfect in the sense you have
got--you know the contrast range is
| | 09:08 | such that the detail is lost there.
| | 09:11 | But again, it's not perfection, and
available light shooting is really not about
| | 09:14 | making it perfect. In many ways, it's
the imperfection that makes the picture
| | 09:18 | stronger. And it's not really
distracting or taking away from the image.
| | 09:22 | Ben: No, and it's fascinating, one
would think in theory this image shouldn't
| | 09:26 | work, your foreground was out of focus.
| | 09:29 | One would think this would be the
subject of the image, but it works perfectly
| | 09:33 | and a lot of that is because of lighting.
| | 09:34 | Your eye is really drawn right there.
| | 09:37 | You shot the Republican National
Convention in 2004.
| | 09:41 | Steve: I did, yes, and these
are a few photos from that.
| | 09:44 | Ben: So this is a big convention center,
and one of the things we are going to see
| | 09:48 | throughout a lot of these images
that you shot in there is something you
| | 09:50 | mentioned a minute ago: you are letting
a whole lot of detail fall out to black.
| | 09:53 | And I think that's really
what makes these images work.
| | 09:57 | You are really controlling the
viewer's eye with the way that you are
| | 10:00 | dealing with the lighting.
| | 10:01 | How dark was it in this place?
| | 10:03 | Steve: Well, I mean the thing about a
convention like this is it's lit for television.
| | 10:07 | So as a photographer, it's actually the
ideal available-light situation because
| | 10:13 | the light may not be bright, but it's even.
| | 10:15 | So once you've established your
exposure, you can pretty well shoot freely in
| | 10:20 | available light and get
really, really nice results.
| | 10:24 | But of course, it depends on who
your main subject is and how the light
| | 10:28 | is falling on them.
| | 10:29 | With this particular woman, the light
on her face was falling very nicely.
| | 10:34 | But because it's lit for television,
the areas where the light is illuminating
| | 10:38 | are beautifully lit, but you also have
pockets where there are very dark areas
| | 10:42 | where light isn't happening, and that
kind of drama really often adds to the
| | 10:46 | success of the image in available light.
| | 10:49 | Ben: Yeah, the contrast in these images is wonderful.
| | 10:51 | Here you have gone outside.
She is plainly--
| | 10:56 | Steve: A television reporter, and this
was shot outside in Times Square.
| | 11:00 | You know the thing is with our cameras
today and available light, the contrast
| | 11:05 | range is so great you
sometimes have to make choices.
| | 11:08 | So in Times Square, when you have brightly
lit illuminated billboards, and then you
| | 11:12 | have a nice light on her, so you
make a decision to get the exposure for
| | 11:17 | her, make sure, because she is what
counts most, and you let the highlights
| | 11:20 | overexpose, and these are choices you make.
| | 11:23 | HDR photography is a whole other way
to do things, but it's not necessarily
| | 11:28 | always going to be a better way to go.
| | 11:29 | Ben: No and I think the black in these
images, it's a great demonstration that just
| | 11:35 | because there is detail to be had
there, you don't necessarily want it.
| | 11:38 | It can be distracting, it can lead the
viewer's eye astray, and it's really about
| | 11:44 | the light, and a big part of what
makes light is shadow.
| | 11:47 | Steve: Absolutely, yeah. Well, thank you.
Ben: The way you are manipulating shadow is just wonderful.
| | 11:51 | It's must easier nowadays that you don't
have to worry about the noise problems we
| | 11:55 | use to have; you can keep your shutter
speed up, you can get these shot as they
| | 11:59 | present themselves, you can work
quickly, and it seems to be what you are doing
| | 12:02 | here. The moments you are finding
yourself and managing to capture.
| | 12:07 | Steve: Yeah, one of the things I do when I am
photographing in fluid situations, I
| | 12:11 | will often use auto ISO, and I will
set my maximum ISO to--depending on the
| | 12:17 | camera--3200, even 6400.
| | 12:20 | So it allows the camera go up high,
but I maintain a minimum fast shutter
| | 12:24 | speed. And for me, a 250th is going to freeze both
any kind of movement that I create or subject.
| | 12:30 | And by doing that, I am guaranteed of
a fast enough shutter speed so that I
| | 12:35 | don't get the blur if that's not what I
want. Because often, blur, if it's not
| | 12:38 | helping the picture, it's kind of hurting it.
| | 12:40 | So that's a technique that allows me
to give up some control and allow me to
| | 12:44 | concentrate on the subject and work quickly.
| | 12:47 | Ben: And it's nice to hear
that you are using auto mode.
| | 12:49 | I think a lot of people think,
well, I have got to graduate from auto
| | 12:52 | modes to manual and really think and have the
difficult time and miss all the shots that I want.
| | 12:57 | Steve: I have heard you say many
times, there is no holy grail.
| | 13:00 | There is only one right exposure in any
situation, and there are many ways to get there.
| | 13:04 | And shooting manual is not going to
necessarily give you anything different
| | 13:08 | than working in program.
| | 13:10 | They will take you to the right
exposure once you learn how to read your
| | 13:13 | histograms, et cetera. So whatever
works fastest I think is the main thing.
| | 13:18 | You want to have full control of what
you are going to get, and you want to take
| | 13:22 | advantage of the technology
if it helps you to work faster.
| | 13:25 | Ben: I think that's great advice.
| | 13:27 | I also think dinner is ready,
| | 13:28 | so we should go get our cameras.
| | 13:30 | Steve: I am hungry.
Ben: All right, great!
| | 13:31 | Ben: We are going to get our cameras out,
turn the lights down and shoot a dinner and
| | 13:36 | give you guys some ideas of exactly
what kind of problems you are going to be
| | 13:40 | facing and how you might solve them
shooting an event like that in low light.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Shooting by candlelight| 00:00 | (cross talk)
| | 00:09 | So dinner has started.
| | 00:11 | Steve is already in there shooting.
| | 00:12 | He is really on the ball.
| | 00:13 | I'm here kind of strategizing what I want to do.
| | 00:16 | I've come into the room, and it's
plainly dark, and so I know that there are some
| | 00:20 | steps I am going to have to take.
| | 00:21 | First step I took was I put
a faster lens on my camera.
| | 00:24 | I've got an f/2.8 lens that's going
to let me get a nice wide aperture.
| | 00:27 | It's going to help keep my shutter
speed fast, so that I know that I'll be
| | 00:30 | able to freeze motion.
| | 00:32 | I also know that I'm going
to need to make an ISO change,
| | 00:34 | so I've dialed my camera up to ISO 400.
| | 00:37 | Now, before I even take a shot, I'm going
to find out if I'm right with my ISO idea,
| | 00:42 | so I'm going to quickly just meter a shot.
| | 00:43 | I'm just going to frame a shot of some
kind, half-press the shutter button, and
| | 00:46 | see what my camera chooses for shutter speed.
| | 00:49 | I'm in Program mode right now, because
I'm thinking I just want to keep this as
| | 00:52 | simple as possible on my end. I can
always make it more complicated later.
| | 00:55 | So, I am metering and I am coming in at
an eighth-of-a-second. That's way too slow,
| | 01:02 | so plainly ISO 400 is
not enough of an ISO boost.
| | 01:06 | So I'm going to crank it up to 1600.
| | 01:07 | That's going to give me two
more stops. We'll see what we get.
| | 01:12 | Coming up to a 30th of a second at f/2.8.
That's as wide as this aperture will
| | 01:16 | go. A 30th of a second is getting
closer, but that's still a little slow.
| | 01:20 | They're moving around some.
| | 01:23 | I'm going to bump it up to 3200.
| | 01:25 | I know I can go to 3200 on this
camera without suffering a noise penalty.
| | 01:29 | So I might as well use it
and see what I get here.
| | 01:31 | It's getting me up to a
40th or a 50th of a second.
| | 01:36 | That's helping and I think I'm
going to be able to work with that.
| | 01:39 | So I've identified that
I need to be at ISO 3200.
| | 01:43 | That's a 30th of a second or
a 50th of a second at f/2.8.
| | 01:48 | So my aperture is open all the way.
| | 01:49 | So I'm going to stay there right now, do
a little shooting, and see if I need to
| | 01:53 | make some other adjustments.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Choosing a mode| 00:00 | (cross talk)
Ben: So I have zeroed in on an ISO strategy.
| | 00:04 | I have got my ISO up I think where it
needs to be get me a decent shutter speed.
| | 00:07 | I am shooting at 3200. Is that
about where you are at?
| | 00:10 | Steve: Yeah, I am actually a little bit higher.
| | 00:11 | This camera allows me shoot at even
higher than that, at 6400, so I am taking
| | 00:15 | advantage of it, because
the light is really low here.
| | 00:18 | Ben: There's also a mode choice to be made.
| | 00:20 | Obviously, I can change the shooting
mode on my camera, which gives me more or
| | 00:23 | less control over different parameters.
| | 00:26 | What's your approach on this one, Steve?
| | 00:27 | Steve: Well, I am a big fan of aperture priority.
| | 00:30 | I use probably aperture priority about
88% of the time when I am shooting, but
| | 00:34 | in certain situations I like to go to
manual. Then reason being, in this particular
| | 00:38 | situation the, light is fairly even, so
wherever I kind of aim my camera, the
| | 00:44 | exposure is going to be fairly constant.
| | 00:46 | So once I determine my exposure, when
I go to manual, I have the freedom to
| | 00:50 | include point light sources like
candles without affecting it. And because I'm
| | 00:54 | shooting kind of wide, if I was in an
auto mode and I go real close up to
| | 00:59 | the candle, it's going to affect the meter
and maybe you want to underexpose a little.
| | 01:02 | So in this instance, I am
going to go with manual.
| | 01:06 | Ben: So what you're worried about is in
automatic mode framing wide enough, which is
| | 01:12 | hard not to do, he has got a 16-35
lens, so he's got a pretty wide angle,
| | 01:16 | the bright candles are
possibly going to throw the meter off.
| | 01:19 | They are going to expose--the meter
is going to expose where the candles and
| | 01:22 | your scene is going to go dark.
| | 01:22 | So you are locking in your exposure by
going to manual mode and preventing that
| | 01:26 | problem from happening.
| | 01:27 | Steve: I am, because for me, the most
important thing is to get the exposure right on
| | 01:31 | the guests here at the dinner party.
| | 01:33 | I want to get nice shots of the people.
| | 01:35 | If the candles blow out a little,
I am not going to worry about that.
| | 01:40 | I am going to use those as
more of a framing device.
| | 01:42 | Ben: Okay. I am shooting with a faster lens
than you are; I am shooting with a 2.8 16-35.
| | 01:47 | You've got a f/4 16-35.
| | 01:50 | I think I am going to go to aperture
priority mode, because I want to be sure
| | 01:53 | that that aperture stays really wide.
And it's dark enough in here that you
| | 01:56 | might think, well, it's going to stay
really wide anyway, but I am noticing
| | 01:58 | it is closing down to 35 a little bit, and I
want to be sure that I can keep it opened.
| | 02:03 | Different strategies.
| | 02:04 | One is not right or wrong necessarily.
We'll do some shooting and find out,
| | 02:08 | maybe that my Aperture Priority idea
is just not going to work out for me.
| | 02:12 | Ben: Let's go over there and take some pictures.
Steve: Let's do it.
| | 02:14 | (cross talk and cameras shooting)
| | 02:36 | Ben: Did you go into manual mode and meter
there and follow your meter and set your
| | 02:41 | parameters that way, or did you take a
reading in another mode and then dial that into manual mode?
| | 02:45 | Steve: That's a good question.
| | 02:46 | I mean certainly, maybe the textbook way
is to be in manual and meter that way,
| | 02:50 | but because I use Aperture Priority
about 90% of the time, it's a very natural
| | 02:56 | thing for me to be in Aperture
Priority to make sure that I aim my camera at
| | 03:01 | the areas that are important,
particularly a neutral tone, a neutral gray area,
| | 03:06 | determine what that reading is,
remember it, and then set it manually. And once
| | 03:10 | I've set it, I can forget it and then I
can concentrate on capturing the moments.
| | 03:13 | Ben: Right. Standing in here in the room right now,
it doesn't look like it's that dark of
| | 03:18 | a room, but you start looking through
that viewfinder and you start seeing
| | 03:21 | those slow shutter speeds and this
is really kind of an intense low-light
| | 03:24 | situation. It's a much more difficult
shooting situation than you may think
| | 03:27 | when you first walk in here.
| | 03:29 | Steve: No question, I mean I don't really like
to as we--as none of us do, we don't
| | 03:33 | really like to necessarily shoot at
the very high ISOs, but at the same time,
| | 03:37 | we are not afraid of it, because now we can
get shots that we wouldn't have got otherwise.
| | 03:41 | We can capture the natural light in a
very natural way. And the shutter speed
| | 03:46 | was not necessarily as fast as I'd like, but I
think a lot of those images are going to be shot.
| | 03:50 | There may be a few people of people who
were really moving that will be little
| | 03:53 | blurred and sometimes a little blur
in an available light shot can add to the
| | 03:58 | atmosphere of the
situation you are photographing.
| | 04:03 | Ben: I did a little experimenting.
| | 04:04 | I shot some in aperture priority mode.
| | 04:06 | I went back to program mode and I
actually could not confuse the meter.
| | 04:09 | I was pleased to find that the candles
are not enough of a point light source
| | 04:13 | that they were throwing the meter off.
| | 04:14 | What I am finding myself frustrated
by is I don't think I want the wide
| | 04:17 | angle that I am using.
| | 04:18 | I think that I want to go more
telephoto, and so I'm going to switch to a
| | 04:21 | longer lens, stay in aperture priority mode,
and go for some really shallow depth of field.
| | 04:27 | I think the next thing we want to
think about though is being sure that our
| | 04:30 | shots are sharp, so we are going to
come back and talk to you about stabilization.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Exploring the role of lens stabilization| 00:00 | (cross talk)
| | 00:06 | By now, you should be pretty aware that
the big problem you're going to face in
| | 00:09 | low light is simply blurry images.
| | 00:12 | When the light gets low, your shutter
speed slows down, and it becomes much
| | 00:16 | harder to freeze motion, and you
introduce the problem of camera shake.
| | 00:20 | There are a lot of different things
you can do to try and mitigate that.
| | 00:23 | Steve, you're very excited
about your VR lens.
| | 00:25 | Steve: I am. You know, VR is a technology that
really has enabled you to get sharp images,
| | 00:31 | hand holding at slower shutter speeds.
And even though we've upped our ISO, mine
| | 00:36 | a little higher than yours,
| | 00:37 | the shutter speed that I'm shooting
at is still not one that I'm convinced
| | 00:42 | movement will not be introduced by
the camera. Obviously VR lenses that
| | 00:47 | stabilize and allow you to shoot at
slow shutter speeds by keeping the camera
| | 00:50 | very safe with the VR mechanism,
| | 00:53 | it won't freeze movement of your
subjects, but it'll keep your camera shake from
| | 00:58 | causing blur. And blur is
often a dealbreaker in a photo.
| | 01:01 | Sometimes it can add to the
atmosphere of the situation and it's okay.
| | 01:06 | But often, it will take away.
| | 01:08 | So you don't necessarily want it.
| | 01:10 | So VR is just one other technological
tool that we can use to make sure that we
| | 01:15 | keep our images sharp.
| | 01:17 | Ben: And I think in a situation like this, you
can also even just start employing more
| | 01:20 | brute-force techniques.
| | 01:22 | These are all people I know.
| | 01:23 | They know that I'm here.
| | 01:24 | It's okay to get my elbows on the table and
really stabilize the lens any way that I can.
| | 01:29 | This is probably not the case where I want
to start dragging out a tripod or something.
| | 01:32 | I want to say moving.
| | 01:33 | I want to stay flexible.
| | 01:35 | I don't want to disrupt the dinner
too much by dragging much gear around.
| | 01:38 | So that's another case where VR or IS, if
you're a cannon shooter, can be a really
| | 01:42 | great way to take care of camera shake.
| | 01:45 | But them there is motion blur.
| | 01:47 | There is the fact that our shutter
speeds are low enough that these people are
| | 01:50 | moving around, and as the evening
wears on, they're moving around more.
| | 01:53 | What can we do to try and
mitigate that problem?
| | 01:55 | Steve: Well, if you're forced to use a shutter
speed that maybe isn't as fast as you want,
| | 02:00 | one of the things that I often
do is I'll do a burst of images.
| | 02:03 | Because if I know I'm at, let's say,
60th, 30th of a second and I take a bunch
| | 02:09 | of image in sequence,
| | 02:10 | I will put my shooting mode into a
continuous high, and often one of those frames
| | 02:15 | is going to be best.
| | 02:17 | One of them is going to be sharpest,
and sometimes it takes shooting a little
| | 02:20 | more, especially when you're forced to
shoots in low-available-light situations,
| | 02:25 | where something's are not as good as
you want, in terms of fast shutter speeds
| | 02:29 | that freeze the movement.
| | 02:30 | Ben: I think another option is
to intentionally underexpose.
| | 02:34 | If I meter the scene and it's coming
out of the fiftieth of a second,
| | 02:37 | I can dial in a -1 stop
exposure compensation and probably both my
| | 02:42 | shutter speed up a little bit.
| | 02:42 | My image is going to be dark, but
another advantage of these great low-light
| | 02:46 | sensors is that I can go into my image
editor and crank up the brightness and
| | 02:50 | probably not suffer a terrible noise
penalty, and that's going to get my shutter
| | 02:53 | speed up a little bit.
| | 02:54 | So these are all a few different
techniques you can try to help deal with the
| | 02:58 | fact that people in your scene
are going to be moving around.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| White balance considerations| 00:00 | (laughter and cross talk)
| | 00:06 | Steve's out there shooting again.
| | 00:07 | I'm in here snacking.
| | 00:09 | There's a problem we haven't
addressed yet though, and that's white balance.
| | 00:13 | White balance, as I mentioned earlier,
is always really an issue when you're in
| | 00:16 | low light because
everything turns a lot more red.
| | 00:19 | Steve and I are taking
different white-balance strategies.
| | 00:21 | He's gone out and is trying a manual
white-balance strategy, and I've decided to
| | 00:26 | simply ignore white balance all together.
| | 00:28 | I'm shooting RAW and so I know that
I'm going to be able to change my white
| | 00:32 | balance after the fact.
| | 00:34 | So--and I wasn't just looking for more food here--
I was looking for my white balance card.
| | 00:38 | What I'm going to do is go out there
and put my white balance card in there
| | 00:41 | somewhere and take a picture of it and
then take it away, and then I know that
| | 00:45 | later I'll be able to use this as a
reference to correct all of the white
| | 00:49 | balance in my image.
| | 00:50 | So we're going to shoot some images
and then talk about it and see what
| | 00:52 | strategy works better.
| | 01:01 | Chris could you hold my
white balance card? Thank you.
| | 01:04 | Steve might be doing manual white
balance, but I'm doing this much fancier white-
| | 01:09 | balance-card-based thing.
| | 01:14 | What I'll do with that is be able
to sample that with the white balance
| | 01:17 | dropper in my RAW converter later and then
apply that white balance to a bunch of images.
| | 01:21 | So that'll give me a real accurate
white balance, but it's going to be an extra
| | 01:24 | step in my image editing process.
| | 01:26 | If I needed to get these images out of
the camera and delivered really quickly,
| | 01:29 | that might be not be so practical.
(cross talk)
| | 01:41 | Okay Steve, I have explained to them
already that obviously in low light we need
| | 01:45 | to worry about white balance and that you
and I took very different strategies.
| | 01:48 | Steve: Yes, we did.
Ben: You went all manual on me.
| | 01:50 | Steve: I did go on manual.
| | 01:51 | This is a little a trick.
| | 01:52 | I don't even know where I learnt it,
but it's very effective, because I
| | 01:56 | actually selected white balance, the
color temperature, and I did kind of a
| | 02:00 | custom white balance, not officially,
but by using the live view, the camera's
| | 02:05 | live view function.
| | 02:06 | I'll show you what I did.
| | 02:08 | I basically activated live view,
so you get a view of the table.
| | 02:12 | You can see the color is not very good here.
| | 02:14 | Ben: There's a red shift that you
usually get in low light.
| | 02:16 | Steve: You really do.
| | 02:17 | So in order to figure out what the
most natural rendition is going to be
| | 02:21 | visually, just using my eye in live view,
| | 02:23 | I press and hold the white balance.
And by turning the front
| | 02:28 | dial, you can see I'm changing the
white balance, and you can see the scene
| | 02:31 | shifting in color until it
becomes kind of natural-looking.
| | 02:35 | I like to go too far back and then come
back and see what looks good. And this
| | 02:40 | gets me really close, just by
eyeballing the white balance.
| | 02:44 | Though in RAW, of course, we can
seamlessly correct without any real repercussions,
| | 02:49 | I find it's easier to get those skin
tones when you get the white balance right
| | 02:53 | out of the box a little closer.
| | 02:54 | Ben: A little closer, right.
| | 02:56 | It can be difficult when things are
shifted really far to the red, even if
| | 02:58 | you're trying to manually correct it in
RAW. You've got so far to go, it's hard
| | 03:02 | to even have a reference point.
| | 03:03 | So that is a very nice way of ball-parking it.
| | 03:05 | It's not super accurate, but it's certainly
better than starting with a really red image.
| | 03:09 | Steve: Absolutely.
| | 03:10 | Ben: White balance is a critical choice to
make though, when you come into low light.
| | 03:14 | If you're shooting JPEG, you
absolutely have to think about white balance.
| | 03:18 | You've got to get it right in
camera because that's going to be very
| | 03:20 | difficult to correct later if you got
a JPEG image, because you can't actually
| | 03:25 | just alter that white balance.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Flash considerations| 00:00 | I want to show you one very simple
mistake that people often make when they're
| | 00:04 | working in low-light
situations, and that's they do this.
| | 00:08 | Your pop-up flash is really
not what you want to do in this
| | 00:12 | particular situation.
| | 00:13 | This flash is not meant to brighten
up a dark area; it's meant to fill in
| | 00:18 | shadows in bright daylight.
| | 00:19 | The problem with the pop-up flash on your
camera is that it's right in front of your subject.
| | 00:23 | It's throwing a bunch of light
directly into their face, and we're used to
| | 00:27 | having light come from above.
| | 00:28 | It's a whole lot of light. It's coming
from the wrong direction. It's not a very
| | 00:31 | pretty color. There are a lot of
things that can go wrong when you use the
| | 00:34 | pop-up flash in a low-light situation like this.
| | 00:37 | First of all, people can just look like
they've got radiation burns; they've got
| | 00:40 | all this garish light on there.
| | 00:42 | You can use the flash exposure compensation
feature of your camera to try and dial it back.
| | 00:47 | But even if you do that, they still look
just like they're lit from the wrong direction.
| | 00:51 | We've got another problem here,
because with this big window that's sitting
| | 00:55 | back behind the table,
| | 00:56 | if I take a flash, I possibly get
this big reflection in the window.
| | 00:59 | There is really just no good that can come
from this flash right now, in this situation.
| | 01:03 | So I'm going to put it down and leave it
down and continue to work with natural light.
| | 01:08 | This is, again, the great advantage of
these modern digital cameras is they can do
| | 01:12 | so well, even in a low-light situation
like this, that I don't need to worry
| | 01:16 | about my pop-up flash.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Problem solving| 00:00 | (cross talk)
| | 00:06 | The far side of the table there has a
lot of nice light on faces. The near side
| | 00:12 | of the table, they're back lit, and
there is not that much I can do about that,
| | 00:17 | in so far as the lighting goes.
| | 00:19 | So as a photographer, I need to make
some decisions about what I can do to try
| | 00:22 | to cover this side of the table.
| | 00:24 | Now, you could make the decision of, I'm
just now going to cover this side of the table,
| | 00:27 | I'm going to shoot the people that
are in good light, and those are the
| | 00:29 | pictures that I'll get.
| | 00:30 | But, obviously, if you want pictures
of everybody, you might find yourself
| | 00:34 | shooting with no choice in
situations where the light is simply bad.
| | 00:37 | So what can I do here?
| | 00:39 | I can choose to overexpose and I do
that with my exposure compensation. That's
| | 00:43 | one way is just dial in a
little more overexposure.
| | 00:46 | I'm going to lose things in the background,
but that's okay; I'm going to pick up faces.
| | 00:49 | I can also ask them to turn.
Particularly if it's a family gathering, or a
| | 00:54 | situation where it's people you know, there's nothing
wrong with asking them to help you out by
| | 00:58 | maybe turning a little bit so
that their faces fall more into light.
| | 01:01 | I think the main thing to take
notice of is that it is bad light.
| | 01:05 | It's really easy to be so caught up in
the moment of people's expressions, and
| | 01:09 | trying to get the shot that you forget
to keep paying attention to the light.
| | 01:14 | My eyes can see much more than my
camera can in these low-light situations,
| | 01:18 | so I really need to be watching it,
really paying attention to, Am I getting
| | 01:22 | good detail on people?
| | 01:23 | Am I getting nice lighting?
| | 01:24 | Am I getting good definition?
| | 01:26 | That's one of the trickiest things
about low light is just paying attention and
| | 01:29 | knowing how to recognize when
you get into a difficult situation.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Understanding aesthetics and composition| 00:00 | (cross talk)
| | 00:04 | We've been thinking a lot about the
technical problems, but good technical
| | 00:07 | solutions aren't going to guarantee you
that you're going to get a good picture.
| | 00:10 | You've got to frame a good
shot, compose a good shot.
| | 00:13 | Any tips for shooting in this kind of
situation for getting better stuff?
| | 00:17 | Steve Simon: Well, I guess, getting that technical
stuff solved and out of the way so you can
| | 00:21 | concentrate on capturing the moments, and
the people kind of enjoying themselves.
| | 00:25 | There are people likely that you know and you
want to get nice shots of them, so you
| | 00:28 | want to capture them while they're having fun.
| | 00:30 | So once you've got the technical
out of the way, you can concentrate on
| | 00:33 | capturing those moments when people
are laughing and having a good time.
| | 00:37 | I would often maybe come in a little bit
close to have something kind of in the
| | 00:41 | foreground to help frame the image a
little bit. And you never know what you're
| | 00:44 | going to do with these pictures,
| | 00:45 | so I might want to isolate some
little close-ups and if I'm going to put
| | 00:49 | together maybe a slideshow or even
make my own little book about the dinner
| | 00:52 | party, it's nice to have a variety of
different images that will help tell the
| | 00:57 | story when you put them all together.
| | 00:59 | Ben: And I think coverage is a good thing to
remember. You're covering the event, not
| | 01:02 | just the people, and that needs to
include all the details of the event:
| | 01:05 | the wine bottles, the glasses, the dishes,
that kind of thing. And those can all
| | 01:08 | be nice little bits of
texture that you can add to things.
| | 01:12 | I think also when everyone is sitting
down and you're walking around with a
| | 01:14 | camera, it's really easy to not even
realize that you're taking all of your
| | 01:19 | pictures from a standing
position, aiming down at people.
| | 01:22 | So it's really good to get down on
your knees, sit down in chairs next to
| | 01:26 | people, start working the point-of-view
aspect of your compositions and really
| | 01:30 | change it up and try
different things.
| | 01:31 | Steve: That's a great point, and you know as
well as I that a slight little movement can
| | 01:36 | move things within the frame.
| | 01:37 | If you kind of move a little bit,
you're going to eliminate maybe distractions
| | 01:41 | or add, include something in the frame.
| | 01:43 | So once you're out there, you want
to be kind of--you're conscious of the
| | 01:46 | expressions and the moments, but
you're also conscious of the little details
| | 01:50 | that might distract from the total image.
| | 01:52 | Ben: And distraction can be a
problem in a low-light situation.
| | 01:55 | We've talked about how low light is
very often high-dynamic-range situation,
| | 01:59 | because you've got these dim areas and
then these candles and light bulbs and
| | 02:03 | things that are really bright, and it's
very easy to have one of those maybe on
| | 02:07 | the edge of your frame, and
that can be a real distraction.
| | 02:10 | You need to try and frame those
things out, put people in front of them, or
| | 02:13 | simply crop them out, and that's a
case where Steve's idea of real slight
| | 02:18 | movements can allow you to rearrange
things in the scene in a really helpful way,
| | 02:22 | to minimize distraction.
| | 02:24 | Steve: And because things are so unpredictable,
I tend to shoot maybe a little more
| | 02:26 | than I normally would in other situations.
| | 02:29 | It's digital. We've got the
cards. We can always delete stuff.
| | 02:33 | But, you want to get it, because the
party happens, and then it's gone and
| | 02:36 | you want to make sure you get the best
coverage, because it's not going to happen again.
| | 02:41 | Well hopefully, it will happen again,
but not this moment, not this night.
| | 02:43 | Ben: It's a lot to keep track of, your
balancing, shutter speed to be sure that you
| | 02:47 | get good sharp images.
| | 02:49 | You're thinking about aperture,
because you still need to worry about
| | 02:51 | depth-of-field control.
| | 02:53 | You're managing your ISO against your
noise. You're trying to keep all of those
| | 02:56 | things in play, and on top of all
that, you're going to do all this other
| | 03:00 | stuff that we've been talking about of
paying attention to people's expressions
| | 03:04 | and what else is in the frame.
| | 03:05 | But it's something that
gets very easy with practice.
| | 03:08 | And one of the great things about a
situation like this is you can practice at home.
| | 03:11 | Shoot the family dinner every
night until you get better at it.
| | 03:15 | Self-portraits at home even can be
something you can set up with a tripod and
| | 03:18 | get some practice managing all these
different parameters.
| | 03:21 | Steve: And the more you practice, the luckier you get.
Ben: That's right! And that's very often a part of it.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
4. Scenario: A PerformanceIntroduction| 00:00 | There are a lot of different
kinds of performance shoots.
| | 00:03 | You might, for example, need to shoots
your daughter's ballet performance or your
| | 00:07 | son's orchestra performance, or maybe
a presentation at work of some kind.
| | 00:10 | Anytime you got someone on a stage
delivering material to an audience in front
| | 00:14 | of them, you are looking at a performance shoot.
| | 00:16 | If you are indoors, you are probably
looking at a low-light situation, and is
| | 00:20 | most likely a very tricky low-light
situation, because you are going to have a
| | 00:22 | bright stage with dark all
around it and dark in front of it.
| | 00:26 | That makes for some really tricky
exposure, and you are going to need to employ
| | 00:29 | some very particular strategies.
| | 00:30 | We are going to look at those
strategies in this chapter, along with
| | 00:33 | everything else related to
performance shooting, because we are going to
| | 00:36 | actually shoot a performance here.
| | 00:38 | We are at the Bayfront Theater at Fort
Mason in San Francisco, and tonight we
| | 00:41 | are going to see and shoot a
performance by Bay Area Theatresports, an improv
| | 00:46 | company that's been working in
San Francisco for over 25 years.
| | 00:49 | We are here early because we have
gone to the work of getting access to the
| | 00:54 | company ahead of time.
| | 00:55 | This is a really good thing to do if
you need to shoot a performance, because,
| | 00:59 | first of all, it allows you to get
in the venue and check things out.
| | 01:02 | I can see the size of the stage. I can
see I have got poles here that are going
| | 01:05 | to maybe make sightline problems.
| | 01:06 | I can start thinking about
where I might want to sit.
| | 01:09 | More importantly, I can maybe get
permission to shoot some things that I
| | 01:13 | wouldn't normally get to shoot in a
performance, such as a rehearsal or sound check.
| | 01:17 | Being able to shoot sound checks and
rehearsals gives you a level of access
| | 01:20 | that allows you to get shots that you are
simply not going to get from a chair in the audience.
| | 01:24 | For example, I will be able to move
around the audience without--or move around
| | 01:29 | the auditorium without disturbing the audience.
| | 01:30 | I can maybe get up on stage if they
allow me and get some angles that I
| | 01:34 | certainly couldn't get from a
chair here in the auditorium.
| | 01:37 | Another reason to establish contact
early is simply to be sure that you have
| | 01:40 | permission to shoot.
| | 01:41 | You have probably been in
performances already and had been told at the
| | 01:46 | beginning, "no pictures" or "no
flash pictures" or something like that.
| | 01:49 | So before you shoot any type of
performance, you need to get permission, and
| | 01:52 | know that it's all always the company
that can give you permission; sometimes
| | 01:55 | it's the venue itself.
| | 01:56 | It might be a union building that doesn't
allow just any photographer to come in and shoot.
| | 02:00 | We are going to talk next about some of
the decisions that you want to make when
| | 02:04 | you walk right into the auditorium, and
whether those decisions happen because
| | 02:07 | you have gotten access ahead of time or
because you have had to walk in with the
| | 02:10 | rest of the audience and quickly
decide where to sit and what to do, doesn't
| | 02:13 | matter, these are critical, strategic,
tactical decisions that you have to make,
| | 02:17 | and we will look at those in the next movie.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Preparing for the shoot| 00:02 | So I have gotten into the theater early.
It's time to choose a place to sit down.
| | 00:05 | We got performers already coming in,
getting ready to start rehearsing.
| | 00:09 | I've got some time to do this
because of the access we have had.
| | 00:12 | If you're walking in with the crowd,
you are going to have to make this
| | 00:14 | decision pretty quickly. Obviously if you've
got a predefined seat, you don't have much choice.
| | 00:19 | So where do I begin if I have got the whole
auditorium to choose. Where am I going to sit?
| | 00:23 | Well, I have got a lot of different options.
| | 00:25 | First of all, obviously I've got these
poles in the way, which are a drag. I don't
| | 00:28 | want to be behind them.
| | 00:29 | You might think, well, I am going to be
right in the front row so that I can really see.
| | 00:32 | Well that is one choice, and I am
probably going to do some of that.
| | 00:35 | Bear in mind that when I am right down
here and looking up at the performers
| | 00:38 | and that's not always the most flattering
angle, particularly with stage light behind them.
| | 00:43 | I think it's going to work okay in
this situation just because the stage is
| | 00:46 | really deep and I am going to be
able to reach back as they move towards
| | 00:49 | the back of the stage.
| | 00:51 | That said, I also need to worry down
here, because I can't get really wide. I
| | 00:55 | can't necessarily see the whole stage picture.
| | 00:57 | So I might want to go back here.
| | 00:58 | If I come back to the middle of the stage,
then I am up a little higher, which is
| | 01:03 | good. I am shooting more level.
I have got a nice wide shot.
| | 01:06 | I could of course go even
further back and shoot down.
| | 01:09 | But there's another consideration that I
need to make, and that's my lens choice.
| | 01:13 | I have got a number of different
lenses with me, and they all have different
| | 01:17 | focal lengths, and they all shoot at
different speeds, meaning they have
| | 01:19 | different maximum apertures.
| | 01:21 | Now by now, of course you know that
because this is going to be a low-light
| | 01:24 | situation, my main concern is going to
be motion stopping. And I have got actors
| | 01:28 | that are going to be actively moving
about the stage, so motion stopping is
| | 01:31 | going to be especially critical.
| | 01:33 | I have on my camera right now at
24-105 millimeter lens. That's a really
| | 01:38 | versatile lens. It can go pretty wide.
| | 01:40 | As I sit right here and look, I can
see that it actually goes wide enough to
| | 01:43 | catch the whole stage, and 105 is a good
amount of reach. That's going to allow
| | 01:47 | me to get some nice one-shot
head-and-shoulders kinds of things.
| | 01:50 | The problem is it's an f/4 lens.
| | 01:53 | I can't go wider than f/4. And a little
metering ahead of time with my camera
| | 01:57 | shows that even at 1600, if the light
is like this, my shutter speed is coming
| | 02:02 | out too slow to stop much motion.
| | 02:04 | So I might think, well, I am
going to switch to a faster lens.
| | 02:07 | I have a 50 mm f/1.2 lens with
me that I could put on in here.
| | 02:10 | That's going to buy me two or three
more stops of exposure, give me a lot more
| | 02:14 | motion-stopping power,
but I don't get the reach.
| | 02:17 | It's going to be harder to get those close-ups.
| | 02:19 | I also don't get super wide-angle.
| | 02:21 | I am not going to get shots of
the entire stage with that lens.
| | 02:24 | However, I'm shooting with a 23
megapixel camera, which means I've got a lot
| | 02:28 | of cropping latitude.
| | 02:29 | So the 50 millimeter might be okay
there because I can crop out of the middle.
| | 02:32 | But let's think about some other options.
| | 02:34 | I have a 16-35 mm lens with me. That's an f/2.8.
| | 02:39 | So that's a nice fast lens. It's really wide.
| | 02:42 | That means that it's not going to do
me much good from back there, but it's
| | 02:44 | going to be a great lens for down here.
| | 02:46 | I am not going to get a lot of close-
ups of it, but I am going to get some
| | 02:48 | nice stage picture shots, and I am
probably going to have a fair amount of
| | 02:51 | motion-stopping power.
| | 02:53 | Now I have also got a 75-300 mm lens,
which is going to give me tremendous reach
| | 02:58 | from the back of the hall.
| | 02:59 | It's an f3.5-5.6, meaning at
its full telephoto, it's at f5.6.
| | 03:04 | That's pretty slow, so I am going to be
fighting a motion-stopping problem there.
| | 03:09 | So what I'm finding from all of this is I
don't have the perfect lens for this situation.
| | 03:13 | So I think what I am going to try and
do is move around, not during the show
| | 03:17 | of course--I don't want to disturb anyone
else in the theater--but there's an intermission.
| | 03:21 | So what I'm thinking I am going to do is
sit here at the beginning and work with
| | 03:25 | my fast 50 and my very versatile 24-105.
| | 03:29 | Later, I'm going to, during intermission,
move and take a seat further back in the hall.
| | 03:35 | I have already checked. The show is not
sold out tonight, so I have got a couple
| | 03:38 | of different options. I am
going to be able to move around.
| | 03:41 | The important thing is whether you
can move around or not, you need to
| | 03:44 | understand how the speed of your lens
and the reach of the lens can affect where
| | 03:49 | you might want to choose to sit.
| | 03:51 | A couple of other things I want to do to
my camera before I get going. I am going
| | 03:54 | to turn off the beep. It makes a lot
of beeps when it auto-focuses and things
| | 03:57 | like that. I don't want to
disturb anyone else around me.
| | 03:59 | This is an improv show. It's not like
an opera, but still, I don't want people
| | 04:04 | feeling distracted by the
sounds that I am making.
| | 04:06 | I'm also turning off the image review.
| | 04:08 | Image review means that every time I take a
picture, the screen lights up with the image.
| | 04:12 | That might be disturbing to other
patrons here, but it's also going to bother me
| | 04:16 | because when I'm shooting, I don't want
this bright light coming on in my eyes.
| | 04:19 | I will need to do some image review
with a histogram to check my exposures and
| | 04:23 | things like that, but I can do that
manually by playing back my images after I
| | 04:27 | have shot them. I don't want
them turning on on the fly.
| | 04:30 | I have got all my lenses set to auto-
focus because I am going to be needing
| | 04:33 | to work quickly and I think I am going to
have enough light in here to pull that off.
| | 04:36 | I've also got my stabilizers
turned on on the lenses that have them.
| | 04:40 | That's going to be critical
to reducing handheld shake.
| | 04:43 | Finally, I really know how to
work my camera's controls in the dark.
| | 04:46 | I don't need to be able to look at
the labels. I know right where the ISO
| | 04:49 | control is. I know right where exposure
compensation is. I'm probably going to
| | 04:54 | be switching back and forth between
aperture priority and shutter priority and I
| | 04:57 | know how to do that by feel. I
know that's one notch on my mode dial.
| | 05:01 | It could be dark in the house.
I don't want to have to be looking.
| | 05:04 | Worst-case scenario, I know where the
light button is for the display on my camera.
| | 05:08 | I can cut my camera to keep from
disturbing other people and check out
| | 05:12 | my controls that way.
| | 05:13 | So these are some of the things that
I am thinking about before I go in.
| | 05:16 | I don't know if my overall strategy
is right or wrong, but it's at least a
| | 05:19 | starting point and I'll have
intermission to think it over and regroup, and we'll
| | 05:23 | talk about that then.
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| Act I: adjusting to the light| 00:00 | (applause)
| | 00:10 | (Female speaker: Good evening! How are you tonight?)
(cheering)
| | 00:15 | (Male speaker: I love that noise!
(Female speaker: What a coincidence! We're all "waaa!" too)
| | 00:21 | (Female speaker: So, welcome to Bet's Improv. Tonight
we're performing an improvisational format that's called a Harold.)
| | 00:29 | (applause)
| | 00:33 | So I shot the first act and I got lucky
because it turned out that the stage was
| | 00:37 | not nearly as dark as I
thought it was going to be.
| | 00:40 | I've been to a lot of
performances here, a lot of improv performances
| | 00:42 | here, and very often the stage lights
are pretty low, which is one reason I was
| | 00:46 | so concerned about having fast lenses
| | 00:48 | and trying to figure out what speed
lens was going to work in what location.
| | 00:52 | So what I've found is early on,
before the show even started, I put a few
| | 00:56 | different lenses on my camera
and metered around on stage.
| | 00:59 | It's hard to get an accurate metering
that way because there are no performers
| | 01:02 | on stage, but it still give me a
ballpark idea of what kind of ISO I was going
| | 01:06 | to need to be working at.
| | 01:07 | And I was very pleased to find that I
could stay at 1600, 3200, ISOs that I'm
| | 01:11 | comfortable with, with my camera noise-wise.
| | 01:14 | Once I have got started shooting
though, it turned out they were flooding the
| | 01:17 | stage with so much light that I really
was not having any problem with motion
| | 01:22 | stopping on any of my lenses.
| | 01:24 | I had started out with the nice fast
51:2 on my camera and was thinking, "I'm
| | 01:28 | going to have to be real careful about
depth of field and focus because that
| | 01:31 | lens is so fast, the focus can be difficult."
| | 01:34 | But I was getting such high shutter
speeds that I quickly switch back to the
| | 01:36 | 24-105, because even at f/4 on that
lens, which is as fast as it will go, I had
| | 01:42 | enough light to keep my shutter speed
at the speed it needed to be to stop the
| | 01:46 | motion on the stage.
| | 01:48 | So I got really lucky in that regard.
| | 01:50 | I shot for a while though and then
took a look at one of my images and pulled
| | 01:55 | up the histogram and found that that bright
white background was really overexposing.
| | 02:00 | I hadn't been paying attention to it
during a lot of the show and I finally
| | 02:03 | thought, ooh, that's
awfully bright, let me look.
| | 02:05 | When you see white shirts on stage or
any bright white object being hit my
| | 02:09 | stage lights, there is a good chance
that's going to blow out to complete white
| | 02:12 | in your final image.
| | 02:13 | So I checked my histogram and saw that
in fact the whites were overexposing,
| | 02:17 | so I dialed in about 2/3rd of a stop
of underexposure and took a test shot.
| | 02:22 | The performance was going on. I decided
I'm not going to worry about what I'm
| | 02:25 | going to getting and just going to
shoot, and I saw that that have pulled my
| | 02:28 | exposure down some.
| | 02:29 | I actually tried a couple more test
shots at different amounts of exposure
| | 02:32 | compensation and -2/3rds
seem to be about the best.
| | 02:36 | So I shot that way pretty
much for the rest of the show.
| | 02:38 | If the lighting changed dramatically,
I fiddled with it a little more, but in
| | 02:41 | general I found that that
underexposure was keeping the bright whites under
| | 02:45 | control, and I don't think anything
else is dramatically underexposed.
| | 02:49 | I've got enough latitude to kind of pull it up.
| | 02:51 | One really nice surprise is that I was
finding that in some cases, particularly
| | 02:56 | with the faster lenses like the 16-35, I
can put it on 2:8 or even 3:5 and I was
| | 03:01 | getting shutter speeds at
a 500th or 600th of a second.
| | 03:05 | There wasn't a whole lot of really fast
action on stage, so I didn't need that
| | 03:09 | quick a shutter speed, so I
decided to dial my ISO back.
| | 03:12 | I turned it down, because I had all this
shutter speed latitude and because I can
| | 03:17 | pull my ISO down, it meant I
could eliminate even more noise.
| | 03:21 | (actors performing indecipherable speech)
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Intermission: reviewing the strategy| 00:01 | It's intermission. I've come backstage here
to kind of review my strategy and set up
| | 00:04 | for the second half of the show.
| | 00:06 | I figured out while I was shooting
what seems to be a good exposure strategy,
| | 00:10 | finding myself a little
frustrated by my position in the audience.
| | 00:13 | There on the front row in the
corner, I'm only getting certain angles.
| | 00:16 | I can't shoot the stage square, which
means that I'm getting people really tall
| | 00:21 | in the frame and receding to really
small as I'm using my wide-angle lenses.
| | 00:24 | If I go to a more telephoto lens, I'm
only getting certain sides of people and
| | 00:28 | only certain angles.
| | 00:29 | I was finding as people came over to my
side of the stage, I was able to get a
| | 00:34 | little differentiation.
| | 00:35 | For the most part, I kind of feel like I
was taking the same shot over and over.
| | 00:38 | So for the second half of this show,
I'm going to keep my exposure strategy the
| | 00:42 | same, but I'm going to
try and change my position.
| | 00:45 | Because we got here early, I had the
good fortune to get permission to block off
| | 00:48 | a few seats in the back.
| | 00:50 | So I'm going to be able to go to the
back of the house, work with my longer
| | 00:53 | lenses, get some full stage picture,
I'd be able to get some angles that I
| | 00:56 | haven't been able to get here, and see
if I can maybe break it up a little bit
| | 01:01 | and get some variation.
| | 01:02 | I'm going to keep my exposure strategy the same.
| | 01:05 | One recommendation for shooting events.
This is an improv show, so I don't have
| | 01:09 | any idea what's going to
happen at any given time.
| | 01:11 | If you're shooting something scripted,
a ballet performance, a stage performance--
| | 01:16 | scripted theater performance,
anything like that, if you can go to the show
| | 01:19 | more than once, you are probably
going to have an easier time at the later
| | 01:23 | viewings, because you're going
to know what's going to happen.
| | 01:25 | You are going to be able to anticipate
action and set up shots ahead of time.
| | 01:29 | Because I can't do that, because
things are unfolding in an unpredictable
| | 01:32 | manner, I'm making sure that when
I'm shooting, I'm keeping this eye open.
| | 01:36 | So I'm watching the stage with both
eyes and I'm trying to make sure that while
| | 01:40 | I'm focused on something over here I'm
not missing something better over there.
| | 01:43 | So that's a really good technique for
situations that are unpredictable or unknown to you.
| | 01:48 | So I'm going to go and get my seat, see
what happens in the second half, and see
| | 01:51 | if I can get some different things.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Act II: moving to the back of the house| 00:00 | (Male speaker 1: Listen, Cromwell.)
(Male speaker 2: Yes, Stanton?)
| | 00:04 | (Male speaker 1: I invited you on this voyage for a reason.)
(Male speaker 2: Oh, do tell.)
| | 00:09 | (Male speaker 1: I have a business venture that
I'd like to float your way.)
| | 00:18 | The move to the back of the stage
was not as successful as I'd hoped.
| | 00:22 | I like the angle, I like being able to
look down, my lens has enough reach that
| | 00:26 | I was getting some nice things; what
hadn't counted on was there were a bunch of
| | 00:29 | other people in the audience.
| | 00:31 | I was having trouble seeing
over heads. I was losing feet.
| | 00:34 | They were being blocked by people's
heads, so I didn't like where I was
| | 00:37 | cropping people's bodies.
| | 00:38 | So I decided to give up on shooting full
bodies and try to simply go in tighter,
| | 00:44 | get medium close-ups.
| | 00:46 | My lens wasn't quite long enough to do
that, so I decided it's time to leave the
| | 00:50 | back of the house and I moved
to a point about halfway down.
| | 00:54 | Now this is a somewhat raucous
performance. It's not like being at the symphony
| | 00:58 | or at a staged play where there are quiet
moments and people really need to hear.
| | 01:02 | People are laughing and so on and so forth,
| | 01:04 | so I'm not too worried about shutter
noise and I wasn't too worried about
| | 01:07 | creating too big of an audio disturbance;
I just didn't want to be in anyone's way.
| | 01:11 | There's an aisle here that I had checked with
ahead of time, I had permission to move down it.
| | 01:16 | So I did that. I got a little bit closer.
That helped. That got me because I was
| | 01:19 | standing up above the audience's
heads, so I was able to get more stuff.
| | 01:24 | I still didn't have a lens that was
quite long enough to really get a lot of
| | 01:27 | nice close-ups from this higher altitude.
| | 01:30 | So if I come here again, I know
I'm going to bring a longer lens.
| | 01:33 | My exposure strategy still worked.
| | 01:35 | Because of what I was finding with the
framing that I was getting, I decided, all
| | 01:39 | right, I can't get in real tight, so
it's time to adapt and decide what can I do
| | 01:45 | here. And what I can do here is rather
than get real intimate pictures of the
| | 01:48 | actors alone on stage, I can get
pictures of the venue with the actors in it.
| | 01:53 | So I pulled out and started to take
some shots including the audience.
| | 01:57 | One of the reasons that I'm doing this
shoot is Theatresports is looking for--
| | 02:00 | Theatresports, the company--is looking for
PR photos and things that they can use.
| | 02:04 | So shots with the audience in them are good.
| | 02:07 | Even if I didn't have a specific goal,
it's a nice way of recording exactly
| | 02:11 | what's going on here and
what the evening is like.
| | 02:13 | So I think the takeaway for me from the
second half was I need a longer lens if
| | 02:17 | I'm going to move to the back of the house.
| | 02:19 | And for those times when you can't get
what you think you're going to get, you've
| | 02:23 | got to look around and
figure out what you can get.
| | 02:24 | And in this case, it was scenes that
included the audience and included more in
| | 02:28 | the stage picture, and are more a
record of the event rather than the action
| | 02:33 | that's going on on stage.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| After the show: lessons learned| 00:00 | The show is over. I'm packed up.
| | 00:02 | I've got a card full of images that
I really want to go home and look at.
| | 00:05 | I've seen a lot of
Theatresports shows, and it's really fun.
| | 00:08 | If you're ever in San Francisco,
you definitely want to check them out.
| | 00:11 | You can find out more at improv.org.
| | 00:14 | I'm glad that I've seen a lot of
theatresports shows because I didn't see much
| | 00:18 | of this one tonight.
| | 00:19 | Shooting a performance is a
really concentration-intensive thing.
| | 00:24 | You're trying to figure out where
the best image is, you're doing your
| | 00:28 | composition on the fly, you're
thinking about exposure, you're trying to pay
| | 00:31 | attention to a lot of things,
| | 00:32 | you're trying not to disturb other people;
| | 00:35 | it's not a great way to watch a performance.
| | 00:37 | If you do need to go shoot your
daughter's ballet performance, you might want to
| | 00:42 | think about going to it more than once
and going first without your camera so
| | 00:45 | that you can actually watch it and enjoy it.
| | 00:47 | Go back later and do your shooting,
because shooting is going to take you out of
| | 00:51 | the performance and you're maybe not
going to see as much as you should.
| | 00:55 | I'm feeling good about what I shot.
I'm a little concerned though about those
| | 00:59 | images that I underexposed, and I
underexposed those to deal with the background.
| | 01:04 | And there were a couple of places where
I underexposed as the lights went lower
| | 01:07 | to get my shutter speed up to
try and freeze some more motion.
| | 01:10 | So I'm looking forward to getting
those into the computer, cranking up the
| | 01:13 | brightness, and seeing if my
underexposure can be corrected. So we're going to
| | 01:16 | take a look at that next.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Reviewing the performance images| 00:01 | Back here in my editing lair, I want to
go over the images that I shot tonight,
| | 00:05 | see if my exposure strategy worked,
and see what I came up with here.
| | 00:09 | One thing before you go into a
post-production process: it's a good idea to have
| | 00:13 | some idea of what you need to get out of it.
| | 00:15 | Now, a lot of times if you're just
wandering around taking pictures, you'd
| | 00:18 | want to get good pictures out of it.
And of course, I want to get good
| | 00:20 | pictures out of this.
| | 00:21 | But I also had some particular ideas
about what I know they can use and what I
| | 00:26 | need to deliver to them.
| | 00:28 | They're looking for images that are
going to work well in print and newspapers
| | 00:31 | and things like that for promotional materials.
| | 00:33 | They also told me that lately, with
performance pictures, they're getting a
| | 00:37 | lot of people who look sad.
| | 00:38 | So, probably want to avoid those
kinds of moments, or anything that could
| | 00:42 | be construed as that.
| | 00:43 | One thing that's a little tricky about
improvise because there are no sets or
| | 00:46 | costumes, it's difficult to tell what
people are doing, and so I think it's good
| | 00:50 | for me to not worry about trying to
tell the story that they were telling.
| | 00:55 | That's irrelevant. I just need
compelling pictures of performers, and I think
| | 00:58 | that's very often true with
performances, particularly more abstract
| | 01:01 | performances, dance
performances and things like that.
| | 01:04 | Don't worry about, oh, well,
| | 01:05 | this was the moment where they
killed the dragon, or whatever.
| | 01:08 | That may not be visible to the
audience, and they don't really care.
| | 01:11 | These pictures are really about the
performers and about those moments and this
| | 01:15 | kind of stage picture that they were creating.
| | 01:17 | So, going along here, I'm in Adobe Bridge.
| | 01:20 | I've already pulled my images in.
| | 01:23 | I've got them all in a folder so I
can easily review them. And I've got my
| | 01:27 | Metadata panel up here, because I want
to very quickly be able to assess what
| | 01:31 | might have gone wrong with an
image, if something's not quite right.
| | 01:34 | And as I look at this, right away I can
see boy, it looks awfully hot. And she's
| | 01:38 | very overexposed here on her face.
| | 01:41 | Bridge does not offer a histogram
display, so I can't tell if that's
| | 01:44 | really overexposed.
| | 01:45 | I'm going to go a little bit further
and I see that there are a number of these
| | 01:49 | that look really bright.
| | 01:50 | I'm going to open one of these up here
in Photoshop just real quick to see if
| | 01:55 | this is something that's recoverable.
| | 01:57 | Yeah, look at that big spike
right there. Bad overexposure there.
| | 02:01 | My Recovery slider though gets most of it back.
| | 02:05 | I can see now that the areas that are
clipped, no, they're still in there, but I
| | 02:08 | think that's mostly Red channel clipping.
| | 02:12 | If I fix my white balance, which I can
do with my White Balance dropper here,
| | 02:17 | yeah, I see that actually, this
exposure is completely manageable.
| | 02:21 | So, for the time being, I'm not going
to worry about those other images that
| | 02:24 | look like they're overexposed.
| | 02:26 | My goal here as I work through is I'm
just trying to make my selects strong, trying to
| | 02:29 | figure out what images I like, and
also just trying to give us a chance to
| | 02:33 | discuss the strategy that I had taken.
| | 02:35 | So, right off the bat, I know that
my initial images were overexposed.
| | 02:39 | Fortunately, as I mentioned earlier,
I had identified that in the show and
| | 02:43 | dialed in some underexposure at some point.
| | 02:45 | I noticed in this image
that I've got the lights.
| | 02:49 | It's very easy sometimes to get focused
on close-ups and really think about the
| | 02:53 | performers, which is great--you need
those--but you also at times want to step
| | 02:57 | back and get the whole stage picture
and not just the picture they're creating,
| | 02:59 | but the environment the
sense of place. For the audience,
| | 03:02 | you do notice the lights, you do
notice the keyboard player there, and it's
| | 03:05 | nice to have a record of that. And so
I was just trying to compose around
| | 03:08 | some of those things.
| | 03:09 | Here's an image that's too dark maybe.
It can certainly be brightened up, but
| | 03:13 | this is just a point where the lights changed.
| | 03:17 | So, as I've been going through here,
I've been wading images, things that I think
| | 03:21 | I might want to keep.
| | 03:23 | I'm also seeing the
limitation of my vantage point.
| | 03:25 | I have chosen front row over on the edge
and all of my pictures here are looking
| | 03:31 | up, which is not the most flattering
lighting, and there're all of these extreme
| | 03:34 | angles. It's hard for me
to get in front of people.
| | 03:36 | I am getting lots of hard
profiles and things like that.
| | 03:38 | This I think is a usable image.
| | 03:40 | It's going to need to be cropped;
| | 03:41 | it's going to need some work.
| | 03:42 | One thing you'll find with most of your
performance shooting images as they need
| | 03:46 | a lot of post*production.
| | 03:47 | So, don't worry about what
they look like out of the camera.
| | 03:49 | In fact, we'll take one of these and
take it all the way through to the end, just
| | 03:53 | so you can see how much change there can be.
| | 03:57 | It's difficult at times when you can't
control your position. It can be hard to prevent.
| | 04:01 | In this case, a bad convergence, there's
somebody else's arms sticking out of his side.
| | 04:06 | That's one reason that you shoot a lot.
| | 04:08 | You really need to just blast away
while you're there, not unintelligibly, but
| | 04:13 | it's--things are moving and changing
so quickly that it's hard to know exactly
| | 04:18 | every bit of your composition
while you're working there on the fly.
| | 04:21 | So, you need to really be
sure you have a lot of coverage.
| | 04:25 | Some of these are soft because of motion blur.
| | 04:27 | This was at a 30th of a second at f/8.
| | 04:30 | I could have opened up a little more,
sacrificed the depth of field in this case
| | 04:34 | and gotten more motion capture, but
again, things are happening so quickly,
| | 04:38 | this scene developed so quickly, I didn't
realize he was going to be moving that fast.
| | 04:42 | With that said, there are still usable
pictures in here, like that motion blur in
| | 04:46 | his hand, that's not really a problem.
| | 04:48 | This, again, is a reason if you have the
opportunity to learn the show before you
| | 04:52 | go, if it's a scripted piece that you
can see ahead of time, that's great. You
| | 04:56 | can find out where the fast
and slow parts are going to be.
| | 04:59 | Still battling overexposure in here.
| | 05:01 | This is before I made the change.
| | 05:02 | These images still look too hot.
| | 05:03 | We're coming up on this image where
you can see here I dialed in 2/3rds of a
| | 05:09 | stop of negative exposure compensation
and the images are definitely darker.
| | 05:13 | I experimented there with 1/3rd of
a stop under, and that wasn't enough.
| | 05:16 | I was looking at the histogram on the
back of the camera while I was doing this
| | 05:21 | and so that's how I had decided on 2/3rds.
| | 05:23 | This may look very dark to you, but I
think you'll find, if we open one of these
| | 05:27 | up, you'll see that we've got a lot of
latitude here. Let me quickly set the white
| | 05:32 | balance as best I can, and I
can brighten these up a lot.
| | 05:37 | I'm possibly exaggerating a little bit
of noise, but I know my camera is really
| | 05:40 | clean in that regard,
| | 05:41 | so these are actually very usable images.
| | 05:44 | So, I think this
underexposure strategy was good.
| | 05:46 | Maybe I didn't need to go to
full 2/3rds of a stop under;
| | 05:48 | I might have been able to make
do with just a 3rd of a stop.
| | 05:51 | This is definitely not in keeping
with their idea that they want
| | 05:54 | happy-looking images.
| | 05:55 | Even though this was a funny scene when
it was transpiring, that's probably not
| | 06:00 | something that they're going to
want to use for promotional purposes.
| | 06:04 | Moving along, my exposure is looking good.
| | 06:07 | I'm doing okay with motion blur.
| | 06:09 | I'm up to 250th, 500th of a second.
| | 06:12 | That's something that's a side benefit
of the fact that I'm underexposing is my
| | 06:15 | shutter speed went up, which is nice.
| | 06:18 | It's fun seeing some of these
things play out where I was bursting,
| | 06:21 | get to kind of relive some of those moments.
| | 06:24 | Now there's some point in here where
intermission happened and I changed position.
| | 06:28 | Here I am composing. I like the blue
of this light and the blue of this shirt.
| | 06:33 | This image I think will be cropped down.
| | 06:36 | Again, I'm stuck with these hard profiles,
which can be rough, although here're
| | 06:40 | some nice shots in front of the actors.
| | 06:45 | It's important not to leave out all the details.
| | 06:47 | This is the musical improviser who
was working with them, a key part of the
| | 06:50 | show, even though you never
hear him speak or anything.
| | 06:52 | I wanted to try and get some shots of him.
| | 06:54 | It was difficult with that
particular vantage point.
| | 06:56 | Oh, she's going to love those, isn't she?
| | 07:00 | Another very funny moment, not
necessarily the most flattering image.
| | 07:05 | So, now we're into the second half of the show.
| | 07:08 | You can tell I am more in front of
the stage and getting a very, very
| | 07:11 | different type of picture.
| | 07:12 | Real big change, being up above them,
and that's why--and now here I'm able to
| | 07:18 | see the audience some.
| | 07:19 | I'm getting a very different vantage point.
| | 07:22 | You can see why, if you have the
opportunity to move around, it's really
| | 07:25 | critical to take that chance, or take
advantage of that opportunity, because I'm
| | 07:31 | getting a very different type of
shot here now that I've gotten up above.
| | 07:34 | I've already gone through and rated
some of these, picked out some selects.
| | 07:38 | Let's take a look at those right now and
quickly go through and take one to completion.
| | 07:46 | These are my--I just did a
quick pass, pulled out some selects.
| | 07:50 | Let's see what we've got here.
| | 07:52 | And you'll see what I mean when I say
a lot of these images typically benefit
| | 07:56 | from a lot of editing.
| | 07:57 | Here is a nice moment.
| | 08:00 | I'm not sure about having her
there or having her shoulder there.
| | 08:06 | Another nice moment between two actors.
| | 08:07 | Let's work this image up.
| | 08:09 | I'm going to open this up.
| | 08:11 | These are raw images of course, and
we can tell right away we've got a
| | 08:15 | white balance problem.
| | 08:16 | I don't know what I have in this
scene that I can white balance off of.
| | 08:20 | She's got a tooth there. That might work.
| | 08:25 | That's pretty good.
| | 08:26 | I'm going to keep that and brighten
the image up with my Exposure slider.
| | 08:32 | Difficult lighting situation, because
of all of that pink in the background.
| | 08:34 | This may look like bad white balance but
its not; it's just white lights on her hair.
| | 08:39 | So, before I go any further with my
correction, I want to get my crop in place,
| | 08:42 | because this image
definitely needs to be cropped.
| | 08:44 | And working quickly on the fly like this,
| | 08:47 | it's hard to always get
your framing exactly right.
| | 08:49 | I've got a lot of extra information.
| | 08:51 | When you can't move, when you can't
walk around and change your vantage point,
| | 08:55 | you need to do some cropping. And I
know from experience that my camera has the
| | 08:59 | pixel count that lets me really chop
a lot out of an image and still have a
| | 09:03 | usable picture, particularly at the size that
these will typically need to be put out at.
| | 09:09 | Heavy, heavy shadows over here
because of the stage lighting.
| | 09:11 | I'm going to try and fill those
in with a little bit of fill light.
| | 09:14 | That's looking better.
| | 09:16 | I'm still not sure that I
need all this space back here.
| | 09:18 | I was focusing on her hand.
| | 09:20 | I don't know, I think the real
moment is here in their faces.
| | 09:22 | So, I'm going to come in a little
tighter. And if I'm going to come in that
| | 09:28 | tight, I think I'll pull in here.
| | 09:32 | Again, if this is going to be printed
out at 3x4 inches in a newspaper maybe,
| | 09:37 | we're doing okay size-wise
with our cropping. I like that.
| | 09:41 | It would be nice to brighten up here eyes.
| | 09:43 | I can do that later with a localized edit.
| | 09:45 | There's a lot of stuff in
there that I can pull out.
| | 09:48 | I can whiten their teeth up a little bit.
| | 09:50 | I'm not sure about this pink cast.
There's not that much I can do with it.
| | 09:53 | There's a bright pink wall behind her.
| | 09:55 | I'm going to do one more thing though.
| | 09:57 | With all this white space around, my
eyes are falling off the side of the page.
| | 10:01 | I can only see her face.
| | 10:03 | I'm losing her, so I really, really need
to get my attention in here, because this
| | 10:07 | is really where the image should happen.
| | 10:09 | I'm going to go over here to the fx
tab in Camera Raw where I have this
| | 10:12 | wonderful Post Crop Vignetting tool.
| | 10:16 | This applies a vignette to
the cropped part in the image.
| | 10:19 | Let me pull out my Crop tool here again.
| | 10:21 | My whole image was here.
| | 10:22 | If I use the Vignette tool that you
find over here in Lens Correction--where is
| | 10:27 | Lens Correction? here we
go--I have lens vignetting.
| | 10:29 | This applies a vignette to
the edges of the original image.
| | 10:32 | That doesn't do me any good because
I've cropped, but Post Crop Vignetting will
| | 10:36 | apply actually to the cropped image.
And it not only constrains its effects to my
| | 10:43 | crop; it does these beautiful vignettes
where it preserves highlights just like
| | 10:48 | a real optical vignette would.
| | 10:50 | It's not just blindly throwing in a
darkening; it's paying attention to the fact
| | 10:55 | that these bits are brighter.
| | 10:56 | They are pushing through what would be
in reality a vignette on my lens, so it
| | 11:02 | creates a very, very realistic vignette.
| | 11:04 | And I'm going to just shrink it down
in here and by doing that, I've really
| | 11:08 | changed the focus in this image.
| | 11:09 | I'm just going to adjust these bits
some, and now my eyes are really going much
| | 11:15 | more into her face.
| | 11:16 | The vignetting has caused an
increase of saturation up here.
| | 11:19 | I'm not sure I mind that.
It's created a darkening overall.
| | 11:22 | I'm going to brighten up the mids a little bit
more, pushing in maybe a little more fill light.
| | 11:29 | And I could maybe just to bring even
more focus to the foreground, go ahead and
| | 11:32 | selectively desaturate the background.
I can probably do that in Photoshop
| | 11:36 | with a Hue/Saturation
adjustment layer and a mask.
| | 11:38 | That's something that's a pretty
straightforward technique. But those are the
| | 11:42 | types of edits that I'm going to
be making to all of these images.
| | 11:45 | I'm going to be cropping a lot,
adjusting my brightness, trying to get
| | 11:50 | tones back to where they need to be, and
doing anything I can to bring focus to my image.
| | 11:54 | Because I didn't have a lot of room to
move around, I could not control focus
| | 11:58 | through my lens all the time, but
I can do that in post-production.
| | 12:01 | Knowing that, I know that I want to
next time be very careful about my seat
| | 12:06 | choice, and I probably want to try and
pick a seat where I'm going to be able to
| | 12:09 | do more with that longer lens that I
have, where I can get more in front of the
| | 12:13 | actors faces than I could when
I was over there on the side.
| | 12:16 | I think I've got a good
selection of images here.
| | 12:18 | I can definitely work them into a
really nice set of deliverables that the
| | 12:22 | company is going to really like.
| | 12:23 | If you're shooting stuff for yourself,
you're going to be facing these same
| | 12:27 | issues, these same challenges.
| | 12:30 | Bear in mind what I said
about camera position and choice.
| | 12:32 | I think you've seen the exposure strategy
that I took and for the most part, it worked.
| | 12:35 | Keep an eye on that histogram while
you're there shooting, so you don't have the
| | 12:39 | overexposure problems that I have, and
be sure that you're shooting RAW, so that
| | 12:42 | you can do the kind of
edits that you've seen here.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
5. Scenario: In a CityShooting in the shade| 00:01 | It's easy to think a low-light
shooting as only a nighttime thing, but I am
| | 00:05 | standing out here at five in the
afternoon and I have got a low-light situation.
| | 00:08 | I want to take Heather's picture
here, but we are standing in shade.
| | 00:11 | There is sunlight all around us, but
the shade is sunk behind this building,
| | 00:15 | leaving me in what is not a really
difficult situation, but still a low-light situation.
| | 00:21 | I am going to do a little quick
metering here and I am finding that at ISO 100
| | 00:25 | with my f/4 lens, I'm at
about a 40th of a second.
| | 00:29 | It's a stabilized lens, so I don't
need to worry too much about camera shake.
| | 00:32 | Heather is not loaded up on coffee
so I don't have to worry about her
| | 00:35 | moving around too much.
| | 00:36 | Nevertheless, I think I am going to
bump my ISO up a little bit, and that's
| | 00:40 | probably only going to get
worse as the sun gets lower.
| | 00:44 | So I need to shoot this quickly.
| | 00:45 | The main problem here is in shade
auto white balance on my camera is not
| | 00:50 | going to work very well.
| | 00:51 | Let me show you what I mean.
| | 00:52 | I am on auto white balance, so I am
just going to take a quick shot here, and
| | 00:58 | it's just not quite right.
| | 01:00 | She doesn't have the warmth and the
glow that she normally has, even in shade.
| | 01:04 | So Heather, we are going to do a manual
white balance. I think it's our only hope.
| | 01:09 | I have a manual white balance card
here. I have a white balance card here.
| | 01:12 | This is made by WhiBal, just a little
gray card, and what I am going to do is
| | 01:17 | take a picture of it, of the card,
filling up a good amount of the frame. And
| | 01:23 | now in my camera, I can tell the camera to do a
white balance calculation based off of that card.
| | 01:30 | Now the way I do this will
vary from camera to camera.
| | 01:33 | On my Canon camera, it's pretty easy to do.
| | 01:36 | On other cameras, you can actually
store multiple manual white balances for
| | 01:39 | different lighting situations.
| | 01:41 | So now that it has looked at something
that it's knows is gray, it should be
| | 01:45 | able to calculate a more accurate white
balance than what it was doing when it
| | 01:48 | was in was in auto mode.
| | 01:49 | So let's take another shot here and see.
| | 01:51 | Still at ISO 400, and sure
enough, this is a much warmer.
| | 01:58 | She has got a much healthier
skin tone. She looks much happier.
| | 02:01 | So shade is almost always going
to require a manual white balance.
| | 02:05 | Now I have some other options here.
| | 02:07 | I am shooting RAW, so I could always
correct the white balance after the fact.
| | 02:11 | If I did that, I would still want her
to hold up that card and I would want to
| | 02:14 | take a picture of it.
| | 02:14 | I need that gray reference
during my raw conversion process.
| | 02:18 | So I think the real thing to take away
from this is to understand that low light
| | 02:21 | can happen in the daytime.
Then you'll probably need, if you are in shade, a
| | 02:25 | manual white balance situation, and you
need to think maybe before you go out
| | 02:29 | about whether you're going to
encounter a low light or not.
| | 02:32 | If you are shooting in an urban
environment and you're expecting to be on the
| | 02:35 | late afternoon, particularly in the
winter, you can expect that you are going to
| | 02:38 | be in a shady situation like this, and
so you might want to bring faster lenses.
| | 02:42 | You might want to make a different
camera choice, if you are choosing between
| | 02:44 | your SLR and your little
point-and-shoot camera, because maybe your
| | 02:47 | point-and-shoot camera
doesn't do so well at higher ISOs.
| | 02:50 | So don't forget, low light can
happen at any time of day, depending on
| | 02:53 | your surroundings.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Street shooting| 00:03 | Shooting in the city at night is not
that much different than shooting in the
| | 00:07 | city during the daytime.
Just as in the day, you are going to wander
| | 00:09 | around and you are going to look for
good light, and when you find good light,
| | 00:12 | you are going to work it.
| | 00:13 | You are going to try to find the
subject within it somewhere. You are going
| | 00:16 | experiment in different ways and see
what you can make out of that scenario.
| | 00:19 | Now the big difference is that
during the day, of course, your light is
| | 00:23 | predominately coming from overhead and
it's casting a very particular kind of
| | 00:26 | shadows and illuminating things
in a very particular kind of way.
| | 00:29 | Maybe it's also reflecting off of
buildings and things and creating some
| | 00:33 | indirect light that's very nice, but
it's still all coming over from overhead.
| | 00:36 | At nighttime, your lights coming from
lots of different places and it's lots
| | 00:40 | of different colors.
| | 00:41 | You have got light a bit above you,
but you also got light coming directly
| | 00:44 | from the side. It's all different colors. It's
casting lots of very different kinds of shadows.
| | 00:49 | Areas that you've seen during the day
that you see nothing interesting in might
| | 00:53 | be very, very different and very
compelling at night time, as the light changes
| | 00:57 | and color and shadow really rearranges
itself compared what it looks like in the daytime.
| | 01:03 | This is the fun part of working at night.
| | 01:05 | Otherwise, mundane situations
may become very, very interesting.
| | 01:09 | Now technically, you're not going to
do anything different than what we've
| | 01:13 | already been talking about as
regards to low-light exposure.
| | 01:16 | You are going to be balancing ISO
versus noise, versus image quality,
| | 01:21 | trying to maintain your shutter speed,
and considering your depth of field as you
| | 01:25 | try to keep your shutter speed up.
| | 01:28 | Because of all of these bright
point light sources that are around, like
| | 01:31 | streetlights and window lights and
things, you are going to be running very
| | 01:34 | often into high-dynamic-range situations that
are going to be driving your light meter crazy.
| | 01:39 | We are going to look at some
ways of dealing with those.
| | 01:41 | You are also very often going to be
finding that a scene that looks really night-
| | 01:45 | like and dark, the way your camera
wants to expose it, when the image is done,
| | 01:49 | it's going to look pretty
bright, maybe even like daytime.
| | 01:51 | We are going to show you
some ways of dealing with that.
| | 01:53 | One thing you might want to consider
when working at night is to shift into a
| | 01:57 | black-and-white mindset, because very
often at night it's entirely about light,
| | 02:02 | it's entirely just shadow, light, dark,
and that's very often--you can express
| | 02:08 | that better in black and
white than you can in color.
| | 02:10 | If you are not used to working in
black and white, take a look at my
| | 02:12 | Foundations of Photography:
| | 02:13 | Black and White course for more
information on how to shoot and
| | 02:16 | process black and white.
| | 02:18 | Now you maybe thinking, well yeah,
you're in a big city, you can go out and do
| | 02:21 | low-light urban shooting;
| | 02:22 | I live in the small town, I can't.
| | 02:24 | Absolutely not true.
| | 02:25 | Yes, we have got all these bright lights
and tall buildings around, but you can
| | 02:28 | find interesting light at
night in any kind of small town.
| | 02:33 | Urban situation, rural situations
there is still going to be streetlights,
| | 02:36 | there is still going to be lights
coming out of people's windows, there is
| | 02:38 | still going to be very different shadows,
very different lighting than what you
| | 02:41 | used to in the daytime.
| | 02:42 | So don't let your location be an excuse
not to get your camera, go out at night,
| | 02:47 | and try some of what you have seen here
and what we are going to show you in the
| | 02:50 | next couple of movies.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Shooting flash portraits at night| 00:00 | I said at the beginning of this
course that this was not a course on flash
| | 00:03 | shooting or lighting, that we're
going to be working with natural light,
| | 00:06 | and that's still true.
| | 00:07 | Nevertheless, flash is one way of
dealing with a low-light situation.
| | 00:12 | It's a complicated subject and we're
still not going to do a flash course, but
| | 00:16 | there is one simple thing you can do to
really improve your flash photos in low
| | 00:21 | light, and I want to show that to you now.
| | 00:23 | The problem with flash is
that it has limited range.
| | 00:26 | Anything outside of the range of
the flash is going to be darkness.
| | 00:30 | When you shoot with your flash, the
camera exposes for the level of illumination
| | 00:35 | that your flash is producing and so
anything within that cone of light that the
| | 00:38 | flash makes will be well exposed.
| | 00:40 | Anything outside of it is off limits and dark.
| | 00:43 | Let me show you a
practical example of what I mean.
| | 00:46 | I've got Josh over here.
| | 00:47 | I'm going to take his picture.
| | 00:48 | I'm turning my flash on. I'm at ISO 100.
| | 00:51 | I'm in program mode, so I'm just
going to let the camera decide what to do.
| | 00:54 | Now we have some additional,
artificial lighting on me right now.
| | 00:58 | So I'm going to ask Greg to
turn that off for a second.
| | 01:00 | Greg, could you hit the lights? Thanks.
| | 01:01 | And I'm framing Josh against the
background of this cityscape here and taking a
| | 01:07 | flash picture, and this is what we've got.
| | 01:10 | It's Josh against a dark limbo background.
| | 01:13 | You can see one or two lights, but it's
nothing like what I'm seeing right now,
| | 01:16 | which is Josh and a whole town.
| | 01:19 | So how can I get that whole town?
| | 01:21 | Well you know already that when it gets
darker you need a longer shutter speed.
| | 01:25 | But again, my camera exposed for the
flash level of illumination. It used a very
| | 01:29 | quick shutter speed, one
| | 01:31 | that was too quick to properly expose
the background. But my flash only has a
| | 01:35 | range of about 10 to 15 feet and the
town is way out of range of my flash.
| | 01:40 | So I what I am going to do is
something called slow sync flash.
| | 01:43 | That's going to fire the
flash to illuminate Josh,
| | 01:46 | but it's going to do a long
exposure to capture the background.
| | 01:51 | Your camera may have a special mode for
slow sync flash called night portrait mode.
| | 01:56 | It would be an actual thing on your mode dial.
| | 01:58 | My camera does not have that.
| | 02:00 | Whether your camera has it or not, you
can force your camera to slow sync by
| | 02:03 | simply putting it in shutter priority
mode and dialing in a long shutter speeds.
| | 02:07 | So again I am at ISO 100.
I've dialed up 4-second exposure.
| | 02:11 | So this is just like taking
a normal 4-second exposure.
| | 02:14 | I'm going to press the Shutter button.
The shutter is going to open, stay
| | 02:16 | open for four seconds.
| | 02:17 | The flash is going to fire right away.
| | 02:19 | That's going to illuminate Josh.
| | 02:21 | Now I need to worry about camera shake,
but I don't need to worry that much.
| | 02:24 | The background is going to be
soft and out of focus anyway.
| | 02:26 | If that's a little blurry,
that's not the end of the world.
| | 02:28 | That's why I'm not using a tripod.
| | 02:30 | So let me take that shot and
you can see what it looks like.
| | 02:32 | Greg, lights please.
| | 02:33 | So I'm going to frame him the same. The camera
is focusing, and I'm steadying my camera.
| | 02:40 | I don't feel like that was
particular steady, but it looks okay.
| | 02:47 | You can see here that Josh is
illuminated and now I have background.
| | 02:52 | Here's the image I have before, when it was
just the flash, pretty much limbo behind him.
| | 02:57 | Here's the image
afterwards, with the long exposure.
| | 03:01 | When you're doing this kind of shot, you
need to be careful to warn your subject
| | 03:04 | that you're going to do this.
| | 03:05 | Most people's instinctive response to a
flash is they smile, the flash goes off,
| | 03:09 | and then they turn and walk away or
they change their pose or whatever.
| | 03:12 | In this case, he needed to
stand there for four seconds.
| | 03:14 | Now I could cut that
time down by goosing my ISO.
| | 03:19 | If I put my ISO up to 200, that would
get my long exposure down to two seconds,
| | 03:23 | 400 will get me to 1 second, and so on.
| | 03:25 | As I do that though, I might need to
dial down the flash power using flash
| | 03:29 | exposure compensation.
| | 03:31 | Now we're getting into a lighting course.
| | 03:32 | You can look those terms up on your
own and see how to manipulate those.
| | 03:37 | Slow sync flash though is an immediate
way to get more realistic-looking low
| | 03:42 | light pictures out of your flash.
| | 03:44 | One last comment on these pictures.
Notice that here in my final shot, Josh has
| | 03:50 | one color temperature.
| | 03:51 | He's kind of white or bluish and
the background is really yellow.
| | 03:54 | That's because the camera has
white balance for the flash.
| | 03:57 | So what can I do to make those two
different color temperatures equal?
| | 04:02 | We're going to look at that in the next movie.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Controlling flash color temperature| 00:00 | We've been talking only about
natural light shooting through most of this
| | 00:04 | course, but there will be times in low
light where you will want to use your flash.
| | 00:08 | Now this is not a flash course, but if
your camera has a pop-up flash, it does
| | 00:12 | have some utility in low light, working
as a fill to fill in some shadows and
| | 00:16 | just cast a little bit of
extra light onto your subject.
| | 00:19 | There is problem though very
often with fill flash in low light.
| | 00:23 | Now we have already talked about how
in low light everything is going to turn
| | 00:27 | really red and really orange.
| | 00:28 | Your camera is going to have a
difficult time white balancing with the kind of
| | 00:31 | lighting situations you get
into at night and at low light.
| | 00:34 | Watch what happens if I pop up the flash
on my camera and take a shot of Janna here.
| | 00:41 | I end up with a shot that is well
exposed and the flash is working for me,
| | 00:45 | but notice the difference between a color
on her face and the color in the background.
| | 00:49 | Now we talked about white balance.
| | 00:51 | Every different type of light
shines at a different color temperature,
| | 00:55 | meaning it has a different color cast
to it. And what we've got here is the
| | 00:58 | flash has one color cast and those
lights in the background have another, and
| | 01:02 | so there is this difference between
the lights that's on her face and the
| | 01:05 | lights that's in the background.
| | 01:07 | It works okay exposure-wise,
but it doesn't look that natural.
| | 01:09 | It really looks like a flash picture.
| | 01:11 | It would be nice if the flash were
the same color as the background.
| | 01:14 | It's possible to do that using a gel, a
little piece of cellophane-like material
| | 01:20 | of a particular color.
| | 01:21 | Gels come in a lot of different colors.
| | 01:23 | This is color temperature orange, or
CTO, and you can get these in different
| | 01:28 | thicknesses which create more
or less of a gelling effect.
| | 01:31 | So what I am going to do here is take
this and cut this down and just tape it
| | 01:35 | over the front of the flash.
| | 01:37 | That's going to change the color
temperature of the flash to match the color
| | 01:41 | temperature of the background, and it
should give me a better overall exposure.
| | 01:45 | You can get these from camera stores.
You can get these off of Amazon.
| | 01:49 | There are a lot of places that you can buy gels.
| | 01:51 | So I am going to take a minute
to affix this to my flash now.
| | 01:55 | So using some gaffer's tape, we've got the
CTO gel just stuck over the front of the flash.
| | 02:00 | All that matters is that it
covers where the light's coming out.
| | 02:03 | We don't want to cover too
much of it with the tape.
| | 02:05 | But that's going to color the
light as it comes out of the flash.
| | 02:08 | I am not going to take the
same shot that I took before.
| | 02:15 | And that gives us a balanced lighting
situation between our flash and the background.
| | 02:20 | As you can see, it's much closer to the
temperature of the light that we've got back there.
| | 02:25 | I don't have that blue
cast on her that I had before.
| | 02:28 | So this is a simple way to
balance out your flash with other
| | 02:33 | background lighting.
| | 02:34 | This is not something that you're only
going to do in extremely low light like this.
| | 02:38 | Sunsets are to be the same situation.
| | 02:41 | Anytime where the difference in color
between flash and the background is really
| | 02:45 | noticeable, a simple CTO gel
over the flash is a really easy fix.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adjusting exposure to preserve the mood| 00:02 | One of the reasons you might choose
to shoot in low light is that low light
| | 00:05 | creates a very particular mood.
| | 00:07 | Dusk has a very particular feeling to it.
| | 00:09 | At dusk though, you got to be careful,
because the light changes very quickly and
| | 00:13 | because your camera might work against you.
| | 00:15 | For example, right now I'm liking this
lower light. I am liking the dusky feel
| | 00:20 | that it's giving me. I am getting
this great bit where I have got the sun
| | 00:22 | setting over there, and it's darker over
here, and I want to take a shot of that.
| | 00:26 | This is a pretty
straightforward, easy picture to get.
| | 00:28 | I put a wide-angle lens on. I am
getting some nice drama both from these rocks
| | 00:33 | and from the clouds. But when I
look at the picture, I get this.
| | 00:37 | It doesn't have the
ambience that I am sitting here.
| | 00:39 | It doesn't have that dusk vibe, because my
camera has compensated for the low light.
| | 00:44 | It's brightened everything up and
made it look almost just like a normal
| | 00:48 | full daytime picture.
| | 00:49 | That's not what I was going for.
| | 00:51 | So what I need to do here is override
my camera and dial in some intentional
| | 00:56 | underexposure to bring the levels in
the image back down to how they look to my
| | 01:01 | eye while I am standing here.
| | 01:03 | I am shooting in aperture priority
mode, because this is a landscape shots.
| | 01:05 | I want deep depth of field, so I
have dialed in an aperture of f/8.
| | 01:09 | To get a shutter speed up where I
need it, I've had to bring my ISO up to 800.
| | 01:13 | So now what I am going to do is take
my exposure compensation control and
| | 01:17 | dial it down one stop.
| | 01:19 | That's going to change my shutter speed.
| | 01:22 | Because I'm in aperture priority,
exposure compensation will not touch aperture;
| | 01:25 | it's just going to modify my shutter speed.
| | 01:27 | Now I am going to take another shot,
and when I look at this one, aha!
| | 01:33 | Now we are getting somewhere.
| | 01:34 | That's looking like a dusk shot.
| | 01:36 | I think I went a little too far though,
so I am going to back off and maybe go
| | 01:39 | to 2/3rds of a stop under.
| | 01:41 | Your camera, the exposure compensation,
can probably be set so that it moves in
| | 01:46 | either half-stop or third-stop increments.
| | 01:49 | This is a reason to have the finer
grain third-stop increment, as I need just
| | 01:53 | a little bit of brightening over
what I got before, and I think that's it.
| | 01:57 | I think that's looking a
lot more like I have it here.
| | 02:00 | You'll find the same problem if you are
shooting in the city at dusk, maybe when
| | 02:04 | the lights have just come on and
you're getting that nice mix of a little
| | 02:08 | bit of lingering daylight and mixed
with the streetlights and things like that.
| | 02:11 | Your camera might just brighten that right up.
| | 02:13 | A little bit of under
exposure will take care of that.
| | 02:16 | Landscape shooting at dusk is the same problem.
| | 02:18 | Don't just blindly follow your
camera during these twilight hours.
| | 02:23 | You need to take a look at the histogram.
You need to take a look at the image
| | 02:26 | and consider some intentional under
exposure if you find the camera is
| | 02:30 | brightening the image up so that it
doesn't really look like what it felt like.
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| Dynamic range considerations| 00:01 | Very often, when you're shooting in
extremely low light, like nighttime, you
| | 00:04 | find yourself encountering
high-dynamic-range situations, and that's what we
| | 00:08 | have got here right now.
| | 00:09 | They seem a little counterintuitive
because we tend to think of high dynamic
| | 00:12 | range as really bright skies, and maybe
dark foregrounds and things like that,
| | 00:16 | but we've got a variation on that.
| | 00:18 | We've got this bright street light up
here, this point light source, and we've
| | 00:22 | got all this dark shadow around it.
| | 00:24 | Now, what I want to do is bring
some detail out of that dark driveway.
| | 00:28 | But as I do that, I am going
to blow that light out more.
| | 00:30 | It's going to get bigger
and bigger in the frame.
| | 00:33 | This is very often something you're
going to encounter in low light or at night-
| | 00:36 | time, and there are some
things you can do to manage it.
| | 00:38 | First of all, you an accept that seeing
big blown out lights like that is just
| | 00:42 | part of the aesthetic of night shooting.
It's part of the aesthetic of low-light
| | 00:45 | photography, and personally,
I like the way it looks.
| | 00:48 | I could, if I don't want it, try to crop it
out of the frame, and just simply avoid it.
| | 00:52 | It's still casting light into my scene,
but I don't see the light source directly.
| | 00:56 | In this case though, I like the
lit street next to the dark driveway,
| | 00:59 | so I am going to keep it there.
| | 01:01 | So that means I come down to
just some exposure decisions.
| | 01:04 | Now, there is no right or wrong here.
| | 01:05 | I am just trying to make some
decisions about balancing this bright side
| | 01:09 | against this dark side.
| | 01:11 | Right now, we have some extra
light on these so that you can see me.
| | 01:14 | So, as I take these shots, Greg is
going to be turning off that extra light.
| | 01:19 | So let's start with an initial exposure.
| | 01:21 | I have my camera set to aperture
priority, because I am worried about
| | 01:25 | depth of field and I have dialed in an
aperture of around f/7 to get the focus that I need.
| | 01:31 | I've focused my camera, and
I am ready to take the shot.
| | 01:34 | Greg, could you kill the lights please?
| | 01:36 | It's going to be a two- or three-second
exposure and to ensure that I am getting
| | 01:41 | a nice steady shot, I have
set the self-timer on my camera.
| | 01:45 | You can hear it beeping right now.
| | 01:47 | This allows me to take my hand off the camera.
| | 01:49 | The camera has got some
time to slow its vibration
| | 01:52 | and then it takes its shot.
| | 01:53 | All right! So that was a little longer than
three seconds. Here's what I get.
| | 01:59 | This is looking pretty good.
| | 02:01 | You can see that the camera has
really tried to get an even exposure.
| | 02:06 | It's brightened up the driveway
a lot, maybe a little too much.
| | 02:10 | I think I might want to pull that down.
| | 02:11 | You can also see that bright light smearing.
| | 02:13 | I am in a matrix metering mode right now.
| | 02:15 | It is trying to average all the
light in the scene and come up with a
| | 02:19 | good average exposure.
| | 02:20 | And for most night shootings, this is
where you're going to want to be probably.
| | 02:23 | If you're in a spot meter, or more of
a center-weight metering, it's going to
| | 02:27 | either put that into complete
darkness or blow that out way too much.
| | 02:30 | I like this averaging that I get from
matrix metering because now I can just
| | 02:34 | very quickly play with some exposure
compensation to bring things up and down.
| | 02:38 | So I have got this high-dynamic
range situation. I have got bright over
| | 02:40 | here, dark over here.
| | 02:42 | I simply have to decide how
bright or dark do I want the dark part.
| | 02:44 | The camera is doing a good job
of getting me an overall metering.
| | 02:48 | I am going to dial the exposure down a
little bit. I am going to go down with my
| | 02:52 | exposure compensation about two-
thirds of a stop and take another shot.
| | 02:57 | Again, my self-timer is going off. Here we go!
| | 03:03 | I think I like this better.
It's closer to the atmosphere of the scene.
| | 03:06 | The driveway is now a little darker.
| | 03:09 | I've pulled back the flare of the light a
little bit by underexposing a little bit.
| | 03:15 | So, this one is not too difficult to handle.
| | 03:17 | I can mostly just make aesthetic decisions
about how bright or dark I want the shadow areas.
| | 03:23 | I am absolutely overexposing the light.
| | 03:25 | There is no way around it,
and you don't worry about it.
| | 03:28 | Is this a case where I could employ
some high-dynamic-range techniques?
| | 03:31 | I could, but I don't really think
there is a reason to, because there is not
| | 03:35 | so much middle tonality in the scene to
bring up. There's just not a lot of light here.
| | 03:39 | Still, it's worth experimenting with.
If you're not familiar with HDR, take a
| | 03:43 | look at my High Dynamic Range course,
which will walk you through all the steps
| | 03:47 | of shooting multiple images and
combining them into a high-dynamic-range scene.
| | 03:52 | Keep an eye on those point light
sources as you're out shooting at night, or in
| | 03:54 | low light, and try to get in the habit
of paying attention to them, recognizing,
| | 03:59 | and making some intelligent
decisions about how to handle them.
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|
|
6. Scenario: LandscapesShooting lingering sunsets| 00:00 | The high ISO capabilities of today's
cameras opens up a wealth of low-light and
| | 00:05 | nighttime landscape shooting possibilities.
| | 00:08 | But with those new opportunities comes
some new problems, and in this chapter,
| | 00:10 | we're going to look at the different
issues you'll face when you take your
| | 00:13 | camera out at night and
point it at a landscape.
| | 00:17 | Before we get into that though, I want
to bring your attention to one thing.
| | 00:20 | I'm standing here about 45 minutes
after sunset, and I'm looking in the
| | 00:23 | direction where the sun just went down.
| | 00:25 | What I'm seeing with my eye is dark,
| | 00:27 | a nice dark sky with bright city lights.
| | 00:30 | But, if I point my camera at it
and take a picture, I'm going to get
| | 00:33 | something very different.
| | 00:34 | I cranked my ISO up to 3200, and at
the moment, I'm just following what the
| | 00:38 | camera thinks I should do.
| | 00:39 | I am in program mode, and I'm taking its
suggestion for shutter speed and aperture.
| | 00:44 | When I take the shot--and it's a long shutter
speed, because it's dark out here--I get this.
| | 00:49 | That is not a dark sky.
| | 00:51 | The afterglow of the sunset is still
raging through the sky there, and I'm not
| | 00:55 | just getting a really bright sky,
I'm getting a really colorful sky.
| | 00:59 | So I'm bringing this up because
if you have this idea that oh!
| | 01:02 | look over there, it's really dark, and
I'm going to run and take a picture of that,
| | 01:05 | if it's too soon after sunset, you're
not going to get a dark sky; you're going
| | 01:08 | to need to wait till later.
| | 01:09 | The upside of that is you
get this beautiful color.
| | 01:12 | It's this whole new kind of
palette that you can work with here.
| | 01:15 | I've got city lights on, but
a really daytime-looking sky.
| | 01:19 | It's a very interesting thing to play
with, and what's great about it is you
| | 01:22 | don't have to wait too long. You don't have to
go out too late at night to begin to get this.
| | 01:26 | Now, if I turn 180 degrees and shoot in that
direction, I'm not going to have this.
| | 01:30 | The sky really will look dark
in the final picture over there.
| | 01:33 | It's just when I'm pointing into the sunset.
| | 01:36 | Get out a little bit
after sunset, play with this.
| | 01:38 | I think you'll find a number of new
creative possibilities to explore.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Exploring focusing strategies| 00:00 | Low light can play havoc with
your camera's autofocus system.
| | 00:04 | Just like your eye, it needs a certain
amount of light just to be able to see
| | 00:07 | well enough to focus, and when it's
this dark, it just can't get anywhere.
| | 00:11 | I don't know if you can tell, but
Heather is standing over there, but she is
| | 00:13 | in complete darkness.
| | 00:15 | If I try and frame up a shot here in
autofocus. I'm just half-pressing my
| | 00:19 | shutter button to autofocus, just like I
always would, and all I'm getting is an
| | 00:23 | image that's going blurry and then
less blurry and blurry and less blurry.
| | 00:26 | The camera is hunting for focus and
it's not able to find it because it's
| | 00:30 | just too dark out here.
| | 00:31 | So, what happens now?
| | 00:32 | Do I just give up on the shot?
| | 00:34 | Fortunately no. Even though it's
really dark out here, I have a number of
| | 00:37 | options to consider for
trying to get her in focus.
| | 00:40 | Now, we're not going to talk about actually
how to expose her, how to get the finished shot.
| | 00:44 | Right now, we're just going to talk
about getting her in focus, because if we
| | 00:47 | can't get her in focus, we
don't need to worry about exposure.
| | 00:50 | First thing is, I know
Heather has a cell phone on her,
| | 00:53 | so I'm going to ask her to take it out
and do something to cause it to light up.
| | 00:58 | Heather, could you light up your phone please
and hold it up next to your face? There we go!
| | 01:01 | So now you can see there is a nice
bright white spot next to her face.
| | 01:05 | So I can autofocus on that. There we go!
| | 01:07 | The camera beeps, and Heather, you can take
the phone away, and now I can take the shot.
| | 01:13 | So, that's one option is if she has
got some light, I can focus on it.
| | 01:17 | If she doesn't have a phone, then
I've got to wonder about her, because
| | 01:20 | who doesn't have a phone these days?
| | 01:21 | Anyway, if she didn't have a phone--
maybe she left it at home--if she doesn't
| | 01:25 | have a phone, but there is something
else at the same distance as her that is
| | 01:29 | bright--maybe a reflection of something
on the ground or something like that--I
| | 01:34 | could focus on that and
then reframe and take my shot.
| | 01:37 | Again, I just need something light to focus on.
| | 01:40 | There's not anything; it's
just really dark out here.
| | 01:42 | So my next step would be, if she
didn't have a phone, would be to try to get
| | 01:45 | some more light on her.
| | 01:46 | And I've got a few different options for
that, and I have a flash light right here.
| | 01:49 | I can just shine this
flashlight on her to light her up.
| | 01:52 | I'm going to turn it on here.
| | 01:53 | I'm going to warn her to look away
because earlier I nearly incinerated her
| | 01:56 | with my flashlight.
| | 01:57 | Okay, so she's looking down.
| | 01:59 | So I'm just shining the light on her.
| | 02:01 | Now, there is enough that again, when
I half-press the shutter button, it
| | 02:04 | focuses. Now I can take the
light away and take my shot.
| | 02:08 | So that's another option.
| | 02:09 | Of course, you've got to have a
flashlight for that to work.
| | 02:11 | You may not always carry a flashlight with you,
but your camera most likely has a flash on it.
| | 02:16 | It could be a little pop-up flash,
or maybe you have a big external flash
| | 02:20 | like I'm carrying here.
| | 02:21 | This camera does not have a pop-up flash on
it. That's why I have attached this external.
| | 02:26 | So there is a Flash Assist feature that
your camera may have, or your flash may have.
| | 02:31 | And on this particular flash, the way
it works is I've got this clear window
| | 02:35 | that can shine an infrared light out.
| | 02:37 | And if I turn the flash on, the camera
will know that if it's too dark to focus,
| | 02:42 | it should shine some of that infrared
light on her, and that can provide enough
| | 02:46 | of an array of light for
the camera to autofocus.
| | 02:50 | So I get it, it focuses immediately when
I do that, and now I can take the shot.
| | 02:54 | Other systems will actually fire the flash.
| | 02:57 | usually just a short burst or maybe a
series of bursts, just enough for the
| | 03:00 | autofocus system to work,
and then they will shut down.
| | 03:03 | Now, if I don't want to use the flash,
I can autofocus, then reach up, and turn
| | 03:08 | the flash off and take my shot.
| | 03:10 | Another option though is
simply to go to manual focus.
| | 03:13 | I can switch the Manual Focus
switch on my lens here and now I focus by
| | 03:18 | turning the focus ring.
| | 03:20 | Problem is now I'm facing the
same problem that my camera is.
| | 03:23 | When I look through here, it's so dark.
| | 03:26 | I don't know how well I can manually focus.
| | 03:28 | I can get out my flashlight again, and
again, warn Heather that I'm about to
| | 03:32 | blind her with the flashlight, and try
to get some light in there, and using my
| | 03:38 | third hand come up here and
focus somehow. There we go!
| | 03:41 | That's helping a little bit.
Still manually focusing that way
| | 03:43 | can be difficult and take some practice.
| | 03:46 | That's a good workaround for autofocus
troubles, but there's another use for
| | 03:50 | autofocus, or for manual focus, and that
is to lock in a good focus when you get it.
| | 03:55 | Let's say that I know I'm going
to work this shot for a while.
| | 03:57 | I want Heather there and I want to try a
few different framings because I've got
| | 04:01 | this really dynamic background.
| | 04:03 | I'm going to be working with
her at this distance for a while.
| | 04:06 | Once I've focused on her once,
I don't need to focus again.
| | 04:09 | So, I'm close enough that my Autofocus
Assist on my flash is going to work, or
| | 04:13 | my flashlight, or the phone trick that
we looked at last time is going to work.
| | 04:16 | I'm going to go ahead and turn the
flash on and get my autofocus set with the
| | 04:21 | Autofocus Assist from the flash--
there we go! It just beeped.
| | 04:23 | Now, I'm focused properly.
| | 04:25 | I'm going to now switch my camera over
to Manual Focus, and as long as she and I
| | 04:30 | do not change distance, I can shoot and
shoot and shoot and it will be in focus,
| | 04:34 | assuming the autofocus actually worked.
| | 04:37 | So, Manual Focus is often very useful
for locking in something that you've
| | 04:41 | achieved through your autofocus system.
| | 04:43 | Because it can take a long time to
focus in low light, that can really slow
| | 04:47 | your shooting down.
| | 04:48 | So, if your subject distance is not
changing, focus once, lock it in with Manual
| | 04:52 | Focus, and you're really going to
be able to speed up your shooting.
| | 04:55 | That can be especially useful
when you're working with a model.
| | 04:57 | You don't want them to have to wait.
| | 04:59 | You want to be able to get them to relax
and let their expressions flow freely.
| | 05:03 | So these are a few different options
you have when you're working in the dark.
| | 05:06 | Again, low light doesn't mean you can't
take the picture because of bad focus;
| | 05:10 | it's just that sometimes you've got to
go through a few hoops to actually get
| | 05:14 | your camera to autofocus
when it's too dark to see.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Composing and focusing at night| 00:01 | I'm standing here on the beach wearing
the hippest beach attire available here
| | 00:05 | in California right now.
| | 00:06 | That's actually a lie.
| | 00:07 | I am hoping you are going to
forgive me my fashion sense.
| | 00:09 | It's very cold, and it's the middle of the
night, and I needed all of this to stay warm.
| | 00:14 | That's often what it is when
you are doing night shooting.
| | 00:17 | So don't forget that when you're packing
your gear and preparing to go out for a
| | 00:21 | long night of night shooting.
| | 00:22 | You might need fingerless gloves,
long underwear, all that kind of stuff.
| | 00:24 | It's also very, very dark out now, so
dark that we have had to light this scene
| | 00:29 | where I am standing and
that rock that's offshore.
| | 00:32 | The human eye is incredible.
| | 00:34 | When it's completely adapted to the dark,
it can detect a single photon of light.
| | 00:38 | Our video cameras are not that good, so we
have had to throw some extra light in here.
| | 00:43 | I am telling you this because I want
you to understand that the scene that I am
| | 00:47 | seeing with my eyes is actually much darker.
| | 00:49 | It's a waxing gibbous moon right now; we
are just a few days away from the full moon.
| | 00:52 | If you want to get a sense of what I'm
seeing, wait for that moon and go outside.
| | 00:56 | I think you will be surprised to see
that I'm advocating shooting in that
| | 01:00 | little amount of light,
| | 01:01 | but that's what our cameras
are capable of these days.
| | 01:04 | So I am not seeing any color right now,
but once my eyes are adjusted and the
| | 01:08 | moon shining on me, I am seeing enough
that I can walk around. I can see details
| | 01:12 | and I can start to barely visualize shots.
| | 01:15 | So what I've seen here is a rock
offshore that's being pounded by waves, and I
| | 01:20 | want to take a shot of it,
for a couple of reasons.
| | 01:22 | Under the moonlight, it's a really
cool light that you don't typically see
| | 01:25 | during the day. And because I am going
to need to do a long exposure, all those
| | 01:30 | waves are just going to create a big
smeary mess of cloudy white around it, and
| | 01:34 | I'm intrigued to see what that might look like.
| | 01:37 | So there are a lot of decisions
to be made here to get this shot.
| | 01:40 | Let's get going here.
| | 01:41 | I have put my 200 mm 2.8 lens on the camera.
| | 01:45 | Obviously, I am on a tripod.
| | 01:46 | It's not too windy right now.
| | 01:47 | I have got the center column up.
I am not worried about camera shake.
| | 01:51 | To further prevent camera shake, I have
activated the camera's mirror lockup feature.
| | 01:56 | What this means is that when I press the
shutter button, the mirror on the camera
| | 01:59 | is going to flip up and stay
there, but the shutter will not open.
| | 02:02 | I have to press the shutter
button again to open the shutter.
| | 02:05 | The reason for this is that mirror
flopping around can vibrate the camera and
| | 02:09 | that can be a problem for
sharpness when doing a long exposure.
| | 02:12 | So I've got my mirror lockup set.
| | 02:14 | I need to think about
focus, exposure, and framing.
| | 02:17 | I am not going to do those in that order.
| | 02:18 | I am going to first start with framing.
| | 02:20 | The problem is it's dark enough out
here that I cannot perfectly see my shot
| | 02:26 | through the viewfinder, even
with this extra light on it.
| | 02:28 | So what I want to do is take a
shot and check out my framing.
| | 02:32 | But taking a shot can take a while if I am
at ISO, even 1600; that could be 30 seconds.
| | 02:37 | I don't want to stand here for 30
seconds just to figure out if I got the
| | 02:40 | shot framed properly.
| | 02:41 | So what I am going to do is crank the
ISO up really, really high, much higher
| | 02:44 | than I would ever actually use.
| | 02:46 | I am going to end up with a really noisy
beat-up picture, but it will allow me to
| | 02:49 | take the shot quickly enough that
I can simply check my framing.
| | 02:53 | Normally the ISO on this
Canon camera goes up to 6400.
| | 02:57 | There is a special custom function I
can enable called ISO expansion that lets
| | 03:02 | me go one or two stops higher than that.
| | 03:04 | Nikon cameras are the same way.
Other cameras also offer a similar function.
| | 03:08 | I have activated that and now I am
going to turn my ISO up to one stop above
| | 03:15 | 6400, which will be 12,800.
| | 03:18 | It's very, very important when you're
doing this kind of work that you know how
| | 03:22 | to operate your camera by hand. When
it's really dark out here, you are going to
| | 03:25 | have a hard time finding controls.
| | 03:27 | So I've got that set up.
I have got my ISO where I want it.
| | 03:31 | I am going to just put the camera in
Program mode because I don't really care
| | 03:34 | about depth of field or anything right now.
| | 03:37 | I want it to just assess an exposure
for me. And it is suggesting, as I meter
| | 03:42 | here, quarter of a second at f/2.8. That's fine.
| | 03:45 | I am going to ask Greg to turn the
lights off now, and you are going to maybe
| | 03:49 | lose track of me. And I want him to
turn the lights off, because I don't want
| | 03:53 | them affecting my shot.
| | 03:54 | I am half pressing the shutter button.
| | 03:56 | My lens is in manual focus right now,
because focus is an entirely different issue.
| | 04:00 | I take the shot.
| | 04:01 | Forgive me that was four
seconds, not a quarter of a second.
| | 04:05 | Here--no, no, I only press the
shutter button once. That's my problem.
| | 04:08 | It is not actually taking a picture yet.
| | 04:09 | I am going to press it again.
| | 04:11 | Now it's taking a picture a
quarter of a second later,
| | 04:14 | it's done, and I can play the image back
and look at it and I think I want to pan
| | 04:20 | a tiny bit to the left.
| | 04:21 | I am going to see if I can see that
at all in the viewfinder, and now I am
| | 04:25 | going to take another shot.
| | 04:27 | So by using this really high ISO, I can
quickly knock out these shots that I can
| | 04:32 | use purely for visualization
purposes, and that's looking pretty good.
| | 04:36 | Greg, you want to put the lights back on?
| | 04:39 | My next question is going to be focus.
| | 04:41 | Now, focus is really tricky in a
situation like this, because, as we've talked
| | 04:46 | about before, the camera needs contrast to
focus, and it's just really dark out here.
| | 04:50 | I can't get enough light on
the rock to focus. I've tried.
| | 04:54 | Part of the problem out here right now is
it's really, really hazy from all of these waves.
| | 04:58 | So instead, I've just gone through
a purely trial-and-error process.
| | 05:02 | I have set the focus ring, taken a
picture, zoomed in on it, adjusted the focus
| | 05:08 | ring again, and I've done that five
or six times until the focus was right.
| | 05:12 | There is a focus indicator on the lens.
| | 05:15 | It stops on this lens at 25 feet, and
then there is a very short distance between
| | 05:20 | 25 feet and infinity.
| | 05:22 | So it's very, very tiny motions
between that last measurement and infinity.
| | 05:27 | So I put it a little bit past 25,
took a picture, and then went until it got
| | 05:32 | sharper and sharper and then started
getting blurry again and I backed off.
| | 05:35 | I'm trusting that I'm going to pick up
some extra sharpness because I'm going to
| | 05:39 | use a slightly deeper depth of
field than what I'm getting at 2.8.
| | 05:43 | So I have got my image focused now.
| | 05:45 | I am keeping my camera on manual so
that I don't accidentally auto focus away
| | 05:49 | from the focus of a carefully crafted.
| | 05:52 | Now what I'm ready to do
is turn my ISO back down.
| | 05:56 | I don't want to work at ISO 12,000.
| | 05:58 | I am going to put it back down on 800
and just see what the camera meters.
| | 06:06 | Now I'm still in Program mode so it's
making all of the exposure decisions for
| | 06:10 | me about shutter speed and
aperture. I don't want that.
| | 06:12 | I want to put it in Aperture
Priority mode so that I can dial in a
| | 06:16 | deeper aperture than 2.8.
| | 06:17 | I am going to put it on 5.6, and that's
saying that at ISO 800, I am at 13 seconds.
| | 06:25 | Now this camera can automatically
take a picture up to 30 seconds long.
| | 06:30 | Longer than that, I need to go to remote
control, and that gets more complicated.
| | 06:32 | So I would like for this shot to keep
my exposure under 30 seconds, because
| | 06:36 | maybe I don't have my remote control with me.
| | 06:38 | I do actually, I am prepared. But let's just
say for the sake of example, you forgot it.
| | 06:42 | So I have got two choices here.
| | 06:43 | I have got some latitude here. I am
at 13 seconds right now at ISO 800.
| | 06:48 | I could drop my ISO to 400 and my
exposure would go up to 26 seconds.
| | 06:53 | That's one stop difference.
| | 06:56 | And by doing that, I would possibly
reduce some noise and I would get a
| | 06:59 | longer exposure, and the longer
exposure is maybe going to make more
| | 07:02 | smearing of the water.
| | 07:04 | Or I can try and go for more depth of field.
| | 07:07 | I could bump my aperture from 5.6
to 8, which would be another one-stop
| | 07:12 | difference, and that should also get my
exposure to 26 seconds, and that is going
| | 07:16 | to give me deeper focus.
| | 07:18 | So I think what I'll do is try one of
each, and you will often find that this is
| | 07:21 | how it goes with low-light shooting.
| | 07:23 | You have got to just bracket lots of
different parameters and see what you get.
| | 07:27 | So I am going to crank my exposure
back up to 8, and now it's saying that my
| | 07:32 | exposure is 20 seconds.
| | 07:35 | Now that's with the lights on.
| | 07:36 | Greg, let's kill the lights and see what I get.
| | 07:37 | Okay, now that's saying 30 seconds.
| | 07:44 | So I am going to drop my
exposure back down. All right!
| | 07:46 | I can get a 30-second exposure at 6.3.
| | 07:48 | I am going to go with that.
| | 07:50 | Press the shutter button once. There is
my mirror lockup. I press it again and
| | 07:54 | I am taking the shot.
| | 07:56 | You are seeing the
mindset I am going through here.
| | 07:58 | I am balancing all of the same things
that I balance with any type of shot in
| | 08:02 | low light or bright light or whatever,
but I have got--I am just really out
| | 08:05 | there on the fringes of the
kind of tolerances of the camera.
| | 08:11 | As my eyes are adjusting, while I'm
waiting, because sometimes these exposures
| | 08:15 | are very long, I'm looking for other shots.
| | 08:17 | You need something to do while you're
hanging around, making very careful not
| | 08:20 | to bump the tripod.
| | 08:22 | This is going to be a 20-second
exposure, and there, it's finished, and that's
| | 08:28 | looking pretty good.
| | 08:29 | I am going to play that back
again and take a look at it here.
| | 08:32 | I want to zoom in and double-check my focus.
| | 08:34 | I am getting a lot of nice, smeary stuff there.
| | 08:38 | As near as I can tell, the focus is pretty good.
| | 08:40 | Wow, that last wave way too close for comfort.
| | 08:43 | The focus looks pretty good.
| | 08:46 | It's hard to really judge
focus accurately on the LCD screen.
| | 08:51 | It's just not really set up for that.
| | 08:53 | Something else to consider is that
it's really hazy here and that's going to
| | 08:58 | be impacting my focus.
So I think that's pretty good.
| | 08:59 | I am going to leave it like that
and I am going to do another exposure.
| | 09:02 | This time I am going to drop my ISO
because I want to be sure that I am not
| | 09:08 | battling any noise, although noise is not
really a problem on this camera at ISO 800.
| | 09:15 | If I drop the ISO, I need to compensate by
opening up my aperture, and I need to go up to 4.5.
| | 09:20 | I am going to take this next shot.
| | 09:23 | When you are working in low light it's critical,
| | 09:25 | as I said, that you be able to work the
camera without seeing it really well.
| | 09:29 | You need to know exactly how many stops
there are, or how many clicks there are,
| | 09:33 | between every mode on your mode dial,
so that you can switch from Program to
| | 09:36 | Aperture Priority without looking.
| | 09:38 | You need to know where your
ISO control is without looking.
| | 09:41 | You need to know where the controls are
for changing aperture and shutter speed
| | 09:45 | when you're in a priority or manual mode.
| | 09:47 | You need to know where the light is, if
there is a light on the LCD viewfinder on
| | 09:51 | the top of the camera.
| | 09:52 | Notice I'm not touching the camera
right now. Stability is critical on
| | 09:56 | these long exposures. And there is
another one, and I am checking that out,
| | 10:01 | and that looks pretty good.
| | 10:03 | Again, I can't really tell too much
here without getting the images home and
| | 10:07 | getting them on the screen.
| | 10:08 | Greg, lights please.
| | 10:10 | And gosh, I wish there was always
someone following me around to just put a
| | 10:13 | light on me like this; it's great!
| | 10:15 | So that's the basics of the thought
process of this type of extremely low-
| | 10:20 | light night shooting, and this isn't even that
extreme because the moon is so bright right now.
| | 10:24 | Now there are some other focus
techniques that we can consider, that we are
| | 10:27 | going to look at next.
| | 10:28 | There's also the issue of stars.
| | 10:30 | It's hazy enough right now and the
moon is bright enough that we have no
| | 10:33 | stars in the frame.
| | 10:35 | We are going to go find another shot
that does have some and that's going to add
| | 10:38 | another parameter to our
decision-making process.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Shooting the stars| 00:01 | If you missed the last movie, I would
like to give you a quick update and let
| | 00:04 | you know that this is not what
I normally wear to the beach.
| | 00:07 | But it's the middle of the
night and it's still really cold.
| | 00:10 | Now we have lit the scene, just
like we did in the last movie.
| | 00:13 | It's actually much darker out here
than what you're seeing right now.
| | 00:17 | We've got a splash of light behind so
you can kind of see where I am at, and
| | 00:20 | we've got me in a pool of light.
| | 00:21 | My eyes though, when these
lights turn off, do great.
| | 00:24 | We are just trying to compensate for
the fact that modern video cameras are
| | 00:27 | nowhere near the low-
light capability of the eye.
| | 00:29 | We are going to try another picture here.
| | 00:32 | It's going to be mostly the same kind
of problem-solving situation that we used
| | 00:35 | in the last image, except this time we
are going to work stars into it, and stars
| | 00:40 | complicate things because they're another
decision you have to make; they're another
| | 00:44 | parameter you have to balance.
| | 00:45 | You got to decide, do you want pin pricks
of light or do you want trails of light.
| | 00:50 | So what I have got here is, in front of
me there is this big impressive punk of
| | 00:56 | rock here. It's very jagged, it's kind
of pointy, and behind it in the sky are
| | 01:01 | some nice stars. I can see with my flashlight
here. You should be able to see this pretty well.
| | 01:06 | So I have framed up a shot by eye. I
am on my tripod here. I have got my 24
| | 01:12 | to 105 f/4 on here.
| | 01:14 | And because of the moonlight, I can
see pretty well just by eye, but I still
| | 01:18 | need to take a shot and look at it on
the screen because it's dark enough, it's
| | 01:21 | hard for me to tell the edges.
| | 01:23 | So I am doing just what I did in the last movie.
| | 01:25 | I am bumping my ISO up to 12,000 so
that I can get a very, very quick shutter
| | 01:34 | speed. That will allow me to get
a very speedy visualization here.
| | 01:39 | I just bumped to the camera so I have a
feeling I am going to have to adjust this.
| | 01:42 | I am in Program mode, because I
don't really care what the exposure is.
| | 01:48 | So guys, could you take out the lights please.
| | 01:51 | So you will probably going to see me
disappear here for a moment while I take this shot.
| | 01:56 | And I have got mirror lockup on still,
just like I did in the last movie. That
| | 02:00 | will help reduce some vibration.
| | 02:02 | Now I am not worrying about
focus on this image at all.
| | 02:06 | We are going to focus separately.
And as I take a look at this, it came in at
| | 02:11 | just one and a third second.
| | 02:12 | So it came up very quickly.
| | 02:14 | This is looking pretty good.
| | 02:14 | Guys, you can hit the lights again.
| | 02:18 | So I am going to lock my tripod down
now. I have the pan unlocked there.
| | 02:22 | So I am feeling pretty confident about framing.
| | 02:24 | Now I need to go to focus. I am in
manual focus right now because, like I said, I
| | 02:28 | was just trying to get an
idea of what the frame looked like.
| | 02:30 | Focus here is going to be much
easier than it was in the last movie.
| | 02:33 | I can actually use my auto focus.
| | 02:35 | I just got to jump through
one or two little hoops.
| | 02:37 | I am switching the lens over to auto focus,
and I am getting my flashlight out again.
| | 02:41 | Now this is a trick we showed you earlier.
| | 02:43 | I am going to just shine light on this
rock, because where there is more light,
| | 02:49 | my auto focus system is going to work better,
| | 02:52 | he says, as his auto focus system
doesn't work. So I am not getting anywhere
| | 02:56 | with auto focus when it is set to
select a focus point of its own.
| | 03:01 | So I am looking at the rock, trying to
see if there is an area of high contrast,
| | 03:05 | and there is right on the edge. Where
the edge of the rock buts up against the
| | 03:09 | black sky, that's a really contrasty area.
| | 03:12 | So I am going to pick a focus point manually.
| | 03:14 | I am going to pick the bottom focus point.
| | 03:16 | And again, this is a case where
it's important to know your camera's
| | 03:20 | controls without looking.
| | 03:21 | I know right where the focus point
control is, so I picked to the bottom focus
| | 03:25 | point. And now I am going
to have to undo my framing.
| | 03:27 | This is just an just an unfortunate
reality of night shooting. And I'm going to
| | 03:31 | put that focus point that I selected
right on the edge of the rock. I am shining
| | 03:37 | my light on it, and it's still
having a little bit of difficulty.
| | 03:42 | I am going to move around until it
tells me it's got it, and there it is.
| | 03:49 | So it's managed to focus. I am now going
to switch my lens back to manual focus.
| | 03:55 | That way, if I half-press the shutter
button, I won't accidentally undo that
| | 04:00 | focus that I just worked so hard to achieve.
| | 04:02 | I am also going to reframe my
shot and lock my tripod down.
| | 04:07 | Now, because I had to adjust my
framing, I am going to do another ISO 1200
| | 04:12 | just quickie take here.
| | 04:14 | Guys, kill the lights please.
| | 04:17 | Just to double-check that my framing is
still okay. So very short exposure comes
| | 04:22 | out. It looks like I need to pan
a little bit more to the right.
| | 04:26 | So a tiny little motion and another shot.
| | 04:30 | This is very often the case in night
shooting. You've got to just work blind and
| | 04:34 | test your actions with some sample shots.
| | 04:37 | Okay guys, you can turn the lights back on.
| | 04:39 | I am framed, I am focused; now
I need to think about exposure.
| | 04:43 | I am going to bump my ISO back down.
| | 04:46 | Now again, I am comfortable enough with,
or I am familiar enough with my camera to
| | 04:51 | know what ISOs I find acceptable noise-wise.
| | 04:55 | I feel quite confident with
this camera up to ISO 3200.
| | 04:57 | I am going to put it on 1600 though.
Because it's low light, there are going to be
| | 05:01 | long exposures. We are going
to be picking up some noise.
| | 05:04 | I have a decision to make now.
| | 05:05 | I want a little bit of depth of field
just in case my focus is off, but I also
| | 05:10 | need to think about the stars.
| | 05:11 | Do I want them to be trails or not?
| | 05:14 | I am at a focal length of, well, the
notch is just a little bit below 50 mm.
| | 05:19 | So I am somewhere between 45 and 50 mm.
| | 05:22 | There is a formula for determining the
longest exposure that will still leave you
| | 05:28 | sharp pinpoint stars, and that is
600 divided by your focal length.
| | 05:32 | So 600 divided by somewhere between 45
or 50. Let's call that 12 to 13 somewhere.
| | 05:39 | What that means is any shutter speed down to
12 seconds will still leave me sharp stars.
| | 05:46 | Once I go past that, I am going to
begin to see little bits of star trails.
| | 05:50 | They are going to be very short, and
they probably won't be noticeable until--for
| | 05:53 | quite a bit after that, until
they get quite a bit longer.
| | 05:56 | Also, this formula is for
full-frame cameras or 35 mm film.
| | 06:01 | If you are using a cropped-frame camera,
you're going to hit that blur point
| | 06:07 | a little bit earlier.
| | 06:08 | You can still use this as a baseline,
but because you're zoomed in tighter, you
| | 06:14 | are going to see that a little bit earlier.
| | 06:15 | So I don't want my shutter speed--
I want pin pricks right now.
| | 06:18 | I don't want my shutter speed to drop below 12.
| | 06:20 | I am going to ask the guys to turn the
lights off again and I am going to take
| | 06:24 | a meter reading here.
| | 06:25 | Again, I am still in Program mode.
| | 06:26 | At 1600, my camera is saying 10 seconds at f/4.
| | 06:31 | That's pretty good.
| | 06:33 | I was worried about depth of field.
| | 06:35 | I could--I was hoping to be able to go to
f/5.6 or f/8, but I am already at 10 seconds.
| | 06:41 | If I go to 5.6, my shutter speed is
going to go to probably 20 seconds, one stop
| | 06:45 | difference, and at that point I am
going to be potentially facing star trails.
| | 06:48 | So I am going to hope that my focus
is good, give up on that extra depth of
| | 06:53 | field, and take the shot here at 10 seconds.
| | 06:55 | Again, I'm still in mirror lockup mode, so
I'm going to just go ahead and take my shot.
| | 07:00 | This is going to be a 10-second exposure.
| | 07:01 | I am being very, very careful as I
handle the camera to not vibrate it.
| | 07:06 | A 10-second exposure, you want to be
sure that you haven't bumped the camera
| | 07:10 | when you press the shutter button,
because even after you take your finger off,
| | 07:13 | it still sits there vibrating and that
can impact the sharpness of your scene.
| | 07:18 | So taking a look at this, that looks
pretty good, and it looks pretty sharp, and I
| | 07:22 | have got nice sharp stars.
| | 07:25 | Now just to be safe, I am going to
bracket this whole thing and I am going to go
| | 07:29 | ahead and dial my aperture down to 5.6.
| | 07:32 | I will pick up a little bit of
extra depth of field that way.
| | 07:37 | I will risk slight trails on the stars,
but I think at this point they are going
| | 07:45 | to be so slight that they are not to be visible;
| | 07:48 | in fact, if anything, they
might just make the stars brighter.
| | 07:51 | Stars will be brighter in your images
if you're using a longer focal length.
| | 07:55 | A telephoto lens, a longer lens
will give you brighter stars than
| | 07:59 | a wide-angle lens.
| | 08:01 | The further stars are from the North Star,
the longer the trails that they will leave.
| | 08:06 | So if you have pointed up the North
Star, all the stars around it will have
| | 08:09 | very, very short trails if
you are doing a long exposure.
| | 08:13 | As you look more towards the
south, the trails will get longer.
| | 08:17 | Okay, so comparing these two images,
I see that yes, the stars have picked up a
| | 08:22 | tiny little bit of length.
| | 08:23 | They still look like points, so I
am feeling pretty good about that.
| | 08:27 | I think that I've managed to get the
depth of field I want and still preserve
| | 08:30 | the stars that I wanted.
| | 08:31 | Now if wanted trails here, I could
simply go to a really long shutter speed, and
| | 08:35 | the easiest way to do that
would just be to turn my ISO down.
| | 08:38 | Guys, you can turn the lights back on.
| | 08:41 | So, for example, at 1600, I am at eight seconds.
| | 08:45 | If I was to drop to ISO 800, I would
go to 16 seconds; 400 will get me to 32
| | 08:52 | seconds; 200 would get me to a
minute; 100 would get me to two minutes.
| | 08:56 | So simply by dropping the ISO, I can
really lengthen my shutter speed and get
| | 09:03 | much longer star trails.
| | 09:05 | So that's just another thing that you
need to balance in here is, I am thinking
| | 09:10 | about depth of field, I'm thinking about
overall exposure, and if I've got stars
| | 09:15 | in the image, I need to think about
whether I want them points were trails, and
| | 09:18 | all of that has to be
factored into the same equation.
| | 09:21 | In the next movie, we are going to
take a look at one more example that will
| | 09:23 | again include all of these
different balancing elements.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Practicing low-light landscape shooting| 00:00 | All right. By now, you should know the drill.
| | 00:02 | You come out in the dark, you stand
around, you look for the shot, you frame the
| | 00:06 | shot, you focus the shot,
you think about your exposure.
| | 00:09 | Now what I have got here now is this
big railroad tie that has washed ashore.
| | 00:14 | And way out over there are
the cliffs and the sea and the rocks
| | 00:19 | offshore, so I am thinking this
railroad tie makes a good anchor for a shot.
| | 00:23 | It's not that it's some kind of
fascinating subject, but it's a place to hold the
| | 00:26 | viewers eye while I frame a larger
shot around this entire scene here.
| | 00:30 | And I want some sky in the
shot because I want some stars.
| | 00:34 | So again, I'm going to start by framing
my shot, and it's bright enough out here
| | 00:39 | with the moon that I have ballparked it
just by looking through the viewfinder,
| | 00:43 | but I still can't quite see
the edges because it's dark.
| | 00:46 | I'm going to now take a shot as
quickly as possible, just for the sake of
| | 00:52 | visualizing here and hence checking my framing.
| | 00:55 | So to get that as fast as possible,
I am going to up my ISO to 12,000--not an
| | 01:02 | ISO that I am going to shoot at, but
one that will allow me to just very
| | 01:06 | quickly capture an image.
| | 01:07 | I am in Program mode. I am in Manual Focus
because I don't care about focus right now.
| | 01:13 | I am going to ask the
guys to turn off the lights.
| | 01:15 | We have got though some lights on me
right here, just so that you can see me.
| | 01:19 | I have still got mirror lockup enabled
and I am liking this framing just as it is.
| | 01:27 | I had fiddled with this
before we started this video.
| | 01:29 | I didn't just nail it right the first time.
| | 01:31 | So we have got the framing that I want.
| | 01:34 | Now I need to think about focus.
| | 01:36 | And in this case I am going to need
really deep depth of field, because I want
| | 01:41 | this railroad tie in focus, and I
want the stuff in the distance in focus.
| | 01:45 | Now I don't have to have a depth of
field that covers that entire distance.
| | 01:49 | The stuff in the distance, if it's a
little soft, that's not going to matter, but
| | 01:53 | we really, really need the
railroad tie to be sharp.
| | 01:57 | So I am going to set a focus point on it
and let my manual focus go to work here.
| | 02:03 | I am switching to Manual Focus.
| | 02:04 | I am getting out my flashlight again.
| | 02:06 | I don't actually need them to turn off
the lights for this; in fact, the more
| | 02:09 | light in the scene the better.
| | 02:11 | And what I am doing now is inside my
camera I have a choice of a number of focus
| | 02:16 | points and it turns out that there's one
sitting just about in the middle of the
| | 02:20 | railroad tie, so I am going to manually
select that focus point and half-press
| | 02:25 | the Shutter button and it is
auto-focusing, so focus is locked.
| | 02:30 | Turn off my flashlight, switch the lens
to Manual Focus because I don't want it
| | 02:35 | to try to focus again, when I half-
press the shutter button, because without my
| | 02:38 | extra light around it's not going to
find anything, and I am going to lose this
| | 02:41 | focus that I have set.
| | 02:42 | Now I can think about exposure. And we are
going to do two different things with this shot.
| | 02:47 | We are going to start just
by trying to get the shot.
| | 02:49 | I am going to dial my ISO down and
just see what kind of shutter speed and
| | 02:54 | aperture the camera thinks we need.
| | 02:56 | I am going to go down to 800.
| | 02:57 | Greg, could you kill the lights please?
| | 03:00 | I need him to kill the lights
to get an accurate metering.
| | 03:02 | I am still in Program mode and the camera
is saying--let's turn the light on here--
| | 03:08 | 13 seconds at f/2.8. Now I have already
said I need deep depth of field; f/2.8 is
| | 03:14 | not going to cut it.
| | 03:14 | So I'm going to switch over to
Aperture Priority mode, which I know is two
| | 03:18 | clicks from program on my Mode dial.
| | 03:20 | Notice that I didn't need to look at the camera.
| | 03:22 | It's good, because it's dark
out here. I can't see the camera.
| | 03:25 | This is what I mean about you
need to be able to work your controls
| | 03:28 | without looking at them.
| | 03:29 | I am going to dial my aperture up to
f/8 and when I meter now, it says 30
| | 03:35 | seconds and it's flashing.
| | 03:37 | Now in this case that means, that it's
saying, I've gone to 30 seconds and it's
| | 03:43 | still not exposed right.
| | 03:44 | So your image is going to be underexposed.
| | 03:47 | So the camera cannot do an exposure
longer than 30 seconds on its own.
| | 03:50 | So I know that f/8 is too
small an aperture at ISO 800,
| | 03:56 | so I'm going to bump my ISO
to 1600 and see what happens.
| | 04:02 | And now when I meter,
30 seconds is still flashing.
| | 04:05 | So f/8 is really causing some trouble.
| | 04:08 | That means that I need to do an
exposure longer than 30 seconds.
| | 04:12 | How do I do that if the camera won't let me
dial in a shutter speed longer than 30 seconds?
| | 04:17 | Well, I have a mode here
on my Mode dial called Bulb.
| | 04:20 | As long as I hold the shutter button down
in Bulb mode, the shutter will stay open.
| | 04:25 | So I can hold it down for longer than 30
seconds and get the long exposure that I need.
| | 04:29 | The problem is handling the camera,
pressing the shutter button and having to
| | 04:32 | hold it here, as it gets colder and
I'm shivering and all that kind of stuff--
| | 04:35 | Greg, you can turn the lights back on--
| | 04:38 | having to hold the shutter button,
that's going to really run the risk of
| | 04:41 | vibrating the camera. So I
have hooked up a remote control.
| | 04:46 | This remote control allows me to press
the shutter button and lock it, so it
| | 04:50 | will take care of holding
down the shutter button for me.
| | 04:53 | Notice, too, that I don't have the
remote control dangling from the camera.
| | 04:57 | I wrapped it around the camera and
around my tripod here, because if it's
| | 05:00 | dangling from the camera and a wind
comes up, that could blow it and that
| | 05:03 | could vibrate the camera.
| | 05:05 | So we have got the remote
control all locked down.
| | 05:07 | So I have a way of pressing the shutter
button without handling the camera, and
| | 05:11 | holding it down without handling the camera.
| | 05:13 | Now I need to know how long to hold it down for.
| | 05:17 | I could sit here and try and calculate
this myself, but it's much easier to let
| | 05:20 | the camera do that for me.
| | 05:22 | Greg, lights please!
| | 05:24 | What I'm doing is I am
switching the camera to Manual mode.
| | 05:28 | Now I know that I told you that I
need to be in Bulb mode, and I will, but
| | 05:32 | for the time being I am going to use Manual
mode to calculate the exposure that I need.
| | 05:38 | So I have said I want it at f/8, and f/8 at
30 seconds at ISO 1600 without the lights on,
| | 05:48 | Manual mode is now telling me
that I am one stop underexposed.
| | 05:54 | So that's information I can use.
| | 05:56 | That's valuable intelligence there.
| | 05:58 | If at 1600 I'm one stop underexposed,
I could go to ISO 3200 and have a correct exposure.
| | 06:05 | But I'd rather not shoot at ISO
3200; I'm little worried about noise.
| | 06:09 | I want to go back to ISO 800.
| | 06:12 | So at ISO 800--that's one stop down
from where I'm at right now--I would be two
| | 06:19 | stops underexposed, at 30 seconds.
| | 06:22 | So, I am going to first dial my ISO down
to 800 and when I do that, Manual mode,
| | 06:31 | the meter is now showing me that I am two
stops underexposed at 30 seconds. Great!
| | 06:36 | So if I am two stops underexposed at 30
seconds, at one minute, I would only be
| | 06:41 | one stop underexposed.
| | 06:43 | At two minutes, I would be well
exposed. That's the exposure that I need.
| | 06:47 | At f/8 I need to be at two minutes.
| | 06:50 | So, I'm now going to switch to
Bulb mode and set my Aperture to f/8.
| | 06:55 | In Bulb mode I have control of aperture,
but I do not have control of shutter speed.
| | 07:01 | I have my phone here now which
has a stopwatch application on it.
| | 07:06 | I know I need a two-minute exposure.
| | 07:07 | I am going to reset my stopwatch.
| | 07:09 | Take my remote control here. I'm in
Mirror Lockup mode still, so I am going to
| | 07:14 | press the Shutter button to raise the mirror.
| | 07:17 | Now when I press it again, the
shutter will open, and I will lock it while I
| | 07:21 | start the timer, and so now I
can let this go for two minutes.
| | 07:27 | Now I've got two minutes to kill.
| | 07:29 | So, I can go look for another shot.
| | 07:31 | I can enjoy the light on the water, or I
can suggest that maybe we just go to a
| | 07:37 | cross dissolve and imply that time is passing.
| | 07:42 | Okay, we have got about 45 seconds left.
| | 07:44 | While we're waiting, I want to
discuss one other matter here.
| | 07:47 | With this long exposure I'm
going to have star trails.
| | 07:51 | There's no way around it.
| | 07:53 | In the last movie, I gave you a
formula for calculating the longest exposure
| | 07:57 | you could use to prevent star trails, and at
my current focal length I'm way beyond it.
| | 08:01 | However, as you saw earlier, I have
framed this shot to be very wide.
| | 08:05 | And at short focal lengths you're not
going to get really bright stars anyway.
| | 08:10 | Also, the moon is up and it's really
washing out the sky, and on this shot I am
| | 08:14 | pointed a little more into the moon, so
that's going to compromise my ability to
| | 08:18 | see very much in the way of stars, and
there are some low clouds and a lot of
| | 08:22 | mist on the horizon.
| | 08:23 | So I don't think that I am going to
get lot of stars in this image anyway.
| | 08:28 | And that's two minutes, so I'm going
to close the shutter, and it comes up, and
| | 08:34 | there is my shot, and it
looks quite reasonably exposed.
| | 08:39 | I managed to pull this off at f/8 at a
reasonable ISO and yes, I can see there
| | 08:45 | is some slight motion in the stars
but they still look fairly pointy.
| | 08:49 | Greg, you can hit the lights again. Thank you!
| | 08:52 | They still look pretty good.
| | 08:53 | So, I'm taking the shots pretty good.
| | 08:55 | I would probably go ahead and bracket
it one stop in the other direction to get
| | 09:00 | rid of the star trails, if I decided I
wanted pinpoints of light, and I would do
| | 09:04 | that by raising my ISO to 1600 and
cutting my exposure time down to one minute.
| | 09:11 | I would still have a little bit of
trailyness on the stars, but it would not be
| | 09:14 | as long as it is here.
| | 09:16 | Obviously, if I wanted to go for star
trails, I would lower my ISO and possibly
| | 09:21 | even close down my aperture to give
me a really, really long exposure.
| | 09:26 | But the way that I would calculate that
again is by going into Manual mode and
| | 09:30 | letting the meter tell me how off my
exposure is at a given ISO, and then I can
| | 09:35 | work backwards from there simply by
doubling either my shutter speed, aperture
| | 09:40 | or ISO, to figure out a good exposure.
| | 09:42 | So, again, it's all a balancing act in
any kind of shooting, but especially in low
| | 09:47 | light, but you should have all the tools
that you need right here on your camera
| | 09:51 | to calculate exposures on the fly
when you get into a situation like this.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Focusing on the horizon in low light| 00:01 | A typical landscape shot is usually
something like I've got here, a big grand
| | 00:04 | vista, where I want everything all
the way out to the horizon in focus.
| | 00:08 | You may not be able to see the horizon
right now because it's too dark for our
| | 00:11 | video cameras to pick it up.
| | 00:13 | So I'm going to take a
quick picture here for you.
| | 00:14 | I've cranked my ISO up to 12,000.
| | 00:16 | I'm just going to grab a quick sloppy
shot of the horizon here so you can see
| | 00:21 | more what I'm seeing with my naked eye.
| | 00:23 | My eye is not showing me an image
that's quite that bright, but I can see that
| | 00:28 | horizon out there, the edge of
the mountains, with my naked eye.
| | 00:31 | If you're new to landscape photography
your first impulse might be, oh, okay, I
| | 00:36 | need to just focus on the horizon, I
need to focus on infinity. That's actually
| | 00:40 | not the way to do it.
| | 00:41 | You got to remember how depth of field works.
| | 00:43 | Depth of field is measured
around your point of focus.
| | 00:47 | So for example, if I have 6 inches of
depth of field it doesn't start at the
| | 00:52 | end of the--my depth of field does not
start at the end of the lens and go out for 6 inches.
| | 00:56 | It starts where I focus and I have half
of it in front and half of it in back.
| | 01:02 | Now by the time I get out to landscape
distances, it's more like a third in front
| | 01:06 | and two-thirds in back.
| | 01:08 | So if I focus on the horizon, two-
thirds of my depth of field falls behind the
| | 01:13 | horizon, it falls beyond infinity, and
that doesn't do me any good there because
| | 01:16 | I can't see anything beyond the horizon.
| | 01:19 | If it was daytime what I would
typically do to focus this shot is focus about a
| | 01:23 | third of the distance in to the horizon.
| | 01:26 | I'd focus there. I'd be sure that I had
an aperture that gave me a lot of depth
| | 01:30 | of field, and then I'd be taking
advantage of that extra two-thirds of depth of
| | 01:33 | field which would hopefully fall back to
the horizon, and everything would be in focus.
| | 01:37 | The problem is in low light I can't see
or focus well enough one-third in; it's
| | 01:43 | very difficult to focus in Autofocus
mode when it's this dark, and I don't have
| | 01:48 | focus markings or distance measures
that let me accurately manually focus.
| | 01:52 | So instead what I'm going to do is focus on
infinity and then pull back a little ways.
| | 01:57 | As you get closer to infinity on your
focus ring, tiny little motions pick
| | 02:02 | you up a lot of room.
| | 02:03 | So if I could focus on infinity and
then back off a little bit, that would
| | 02:07 | probably bring my point of focus back
somewhere in my scene that's a little
| | 02:11 | more useful. That's going to allow
me to pick up more depth of field.
| | 02:14 | There is a tricky thing about infinity though.
| | 02:16 | On your lens you may think well to
focus on infinity I just grab my focus ring
| | 02:20 | and turn it all the way till I see
that I'm on my infinity marker here.
| | 02:24 | On many lenses, including most Canon and
Sigma lenses, the infinity marker though
| | 02:30 | also has this little L shape next to it.
| | 02:32 | What that means is that infinity on
this lens is actually anywhere from here to
| | 02:37 | here. That's because the point of
infinity on this lens varies with temperature.
| | 02:42 | So what do you do? Do you get out a
thermometer? To be honest, I just guess
| | 02:46 | and I bracket my focus a lot.
| | 02:47 | I would take several different shots to
be sure that I'm getting things right.
| | 02:51 | So I would start by saying, all right,
maybe that's infinity right there.
| | 02:55 | What I want to do now is back off a
little bit, so I would just pull my focus
| | 02:59 | back a little bit, take my shot, zoom
in on it, see if I seem to have the depth
| | 03:04 | of field that I want and if not,
adjust my focus manually, and try again.
| | 03:08 | That may sound cumbersome and time
consuming but it's really not that hard.
| | 03:12 | You'll get a feel for your particular
lens and how much you need to move it.
| | 03:15 | Now there is a more accurate old-school
way of doing this, which is to calculate
| | 03:20 | hyperfocal distance and
set your focus accordingly.
| | 03:23 | Unfortunately, most lenses these days don't
have the necessary markings to make that work.
| | 03:28 | So instead, I'm stuck doing this other scheme.
| | 03:31 | In a situation like this where I've
got some lights on the horizon, I could
| | 03:35 | autofocus on those. Or I might even be
able to autofocus on the town and have
| | 03:40 | a good focus marking.
| | 03:42 | If I'm out in the wilderness where
it's completely dark though, I'm going to
| | 03:44 | have to do what I described to you of trying to
focus on infinity and then pull back a little bit.
| | 03:49 | Again, bracketing your focus, taking
multiple shots, and doing some trial and
| | 03:53 | error is going to be the best
way to get around this situation.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
7. Special EffectsLight painting: behind the camera| 00:00 | We've worked pretty much
exclusively with natural light in this course.
| | 00:04 | You've seen a couple of flash
examples, but for the most part, we're just
| | 00:06 | working with the light that we find.
| | 00:08 | As you've seen very often when
working in low light, you're working with a
| | 00:11 | very long shutter speed.
| | 00:13 | The shutter is open for a long time so
that the camera can gather up as much
| | 00:17 | light as possible to create an image.
| | 00:19 | While it's gathering, you can
actually manipulate that light that's there.
| | 00:22 | You can add more of your own
and create a painting effect.
| | 00:27 | I don't mean an image that looks like a
painting, but you can paint things with
| | 00:30 | light to control what's
illuminated in your frame.
| | 00:33 | We're going to do that right now.
| | 00:36 | You probably can't see it right now,
but we've got this cool assortment of
| | 00:41 | gnarled twisted trees here, and sitting
in them middle of them is Heather. And
| | 00:46 | what I want to do is create an image
where she's lit up and the trees are not.
| | 00:51 | Now you might think, well, why don't
you just put a flash on your camera?
| | 00:53 | Well, if I do that,
it'll light up the whole thing.
| | 00:55 | I like the way the trees are
lit up by the ambient light.
| | 00:58 | I would just like to have
her lit up a little bit more.
| | 01:00 | So we're going to paint her with a
flashlight during a long exposure.
| | 01:05 | You can think of these shots exactly as
you would a normal flash picture. And I
| | 01:10 | don't know how much you know about
flash, but typically the workflow is, you
| | 01:14 | decide on an exposure that gets you
good ambient light and then you figure out
| | 01:19 | how much illumination you need from
the artificial light that you're using.
| | 01:22 | So that's what we're going to do here.
| | 01:24 | I've gone ahead and framed my shot
using the techniques that we showed you in
| | 01:27 | the landscape shooting lessons.
| | 01:30 | I have gone up to a really high ISO
so I can get quick shots so that I
| | 01:34 | can adjust my framing.
| | 01:35 | I've also focused using the same technique.
| | 01:38 | I had Heather turn a flashlight on,
and I focused in that bright spot.
| | 01:42 | So my frame and my focus are already set.
| | 01:45 | Now I'm ready to think about exposure.
And I've done some experimenting here, and
| | 01:50 | for exposure, I thought mostly,
first and foremost, about depth of field.
| | 01:55 | My camera, of course, would love to go
open all the way to 2.8, because I've got
| | 01:58 | a fast lens on here, but if I do that,
the depth of field is going to be so
| | 02:01 | shallow and some of these trees are
coming out right in front, that I've tried to
| | 02:06 | stop down a little bit.
| | 02:07 | Now I could stop down to f/8 or
something and have a lot of really nice deep
| | 02:10 | depth of field, but if I do that
then Heather has to sit still longer.
| | 02:14 | So I've decided on f/4.
| | 02:15 | At f/4, my camera has decided
that it needs about 20 seconds.
| | 02:23 | Now we've got some artificial light in here,
| | 02:25 | so we're going to have to turn this
off to take the shot, and it's going to be
| | 02:27 | much darker. That's why it needs 20 seconds.
| | 02:29 | So what I'm going to do first is take
a picture without any light painting.
| | 02:32 | Greg, could you kill the light?
| | 02:35 | As you can see, or not see, it's
very, very dark. Heather, you ready?
| | 02:39 | Heather: Yep!
Ben: So she's going to hold real still.
| | 02:42 | Ben: I'm Mirror Lockup enabled.
| | 02:45 | So I'm doing this 20-second exposure.
| | 02:47 | This is gathering up just ambient
light in the scene, and I want to see what
| | 02:53 | that looks like to see if I have my
exposure set properly, to see if I've got a
| | 02:56 | good amount of ambient light,
because most of the tree is going to be
| | 03:00 | illuminated by that ambient light.
| | 03:02 | So we should be coming up on the end here.
| | 03:05 | I'm at ISO 1600 right now, which I
trust, noise-wise, and here's our shot.
| | 03:11 | That's looking pretty good.
| | 03:13 | It's actually a fair amount of ambient light.
| | 03:16 | As you can see, it almost looks like daytime.
| | 03:18 | What's going to make this look really
different is when we get the light on her.
| | 03:22 | Now I'm thinking of this is a black-and-
white image, so I'm not going to worry
| | 03:26 | too much about color temperature.
| | 03:27 | I'm also exposing to the right a little bit.
| | 03:29 | I've got the exposure up higher than I want.
| | 03:31 | I don't really want the image this
bright, because I want it look like a night
| | 03:34 | shot, but I'm going to be able to darken
image and get those ambient levels back down.
| | 03:38 | So I'm feeling good about my ambient levels.
| | 03:40 | Now we're ready to the light painting.
| | 03:42 | So what's going to happen here is I'm
going to do this exact same exposure,
| | 03:45 | because I know that's right for the
bulk of it, and Greg is going to go run and
| | 03:49 | hide behind a tree and
shine a flashlight on her.
| | 03:52 | Now, of course, if I was by
myself I can go do this on my own.
| | 03:55 | I'm fortunate enough to have a
trained lighting person here.
| | 03:59 | So he is trying to not get too
much light on her, and we've done some
| | 04:03 | experimenting and figured out
about how much is the correct exposure.
| | 04:06 | When he's shining light, he's just
counting off time to himself so that we can
| | 04:10 | control if we do an
experiment and he needs more or less.
| | 04:12 | Ben: Are you ready, Greg? All right!
Greg: Yeah!
| | 04:15 | Ben: So kill the lights and get into position.
| | 04:18 | So he's got his flashlight on, and
what's going on is I need him close to her
| | 04:24 | because I don't want spill from his
flashlight falling on lots of other bits
| | 04:29 | of the tree and other things.
| | 04:31 | So he needs to be pretty close to her, but
if he's too close to her, he's in the shot.
| | 04:34 | So he's hiding behind the tree over here.
| | 04:37 | Greg, I can see your back.
| | 04:38 | Can, you get forward just a little bit,
a little more? That's good, and now I'm
| | 04:44 | seeing the light in your hand.
| | 04:46 | He's holding his hand around--
| | 04:47 | Okay and he's shining the light on her.
| | 04:50 | Now he's shining it very, very dimly,
because at ISO 1600, the camera is very
| | 04:55 | sensitive to the light that he is shining.
| | 04:57 | So he's really having to control it.
| | 04:59 | I think we're ready.
| | 05:01 | So again, I've got mirror lockup.
| | 05:02 | I've also got my remote control here, so I'm
going to use that to reduce camera vibration.
| | 05:07 | So I'm flipping up the mirror, and it's open.
| | 05:11 | So it's a 20-second exposure.
| | 05:14 | He's, through some experimentation,
already decided how much light is going to
| | 05:18 | work out, and he's just
painting it up and down her body.
| | 05:21 | She's trying to hold very still as this
arctic blast sweeps through right now.
| | 05:26 | So, she's really got the hard part
of the job right now, and I'm waiting for
| | 05:29 | the camera to finish.
| | 05:31 | Now there are a few different
elements that we're balancing here.
| | 05:33 | We're balancing shutter speed for
controlling ambient amount of light, aperture
| | 05:39 | for depth of field, and ISO for
how strong the light painting is.
| | 05:42 | That's the exposure.
| | 05:43 | Let's take a look at it.
| | 05:45 | So, it's a very subtle
effect, but this is working.
| | 05:47 | She's just got a little bit of extra
illumination that puts her higher than the
| | 05:51 | ambient light level.
| | 05:52 | We have simply painted her
with light until she is visible.
| | 05:56 | Now I had decided going into
this that this was going to be a
| | 05:58 | black-and-white image.
| | 05:59 | So I'm not worried about the fact
that the color temperature of Greg's
| | 06:02 | flashlight is different
than the ambient temperature.
| | 06:05 | If I was, he could gel his flashlight
like we showed you how you can gel a flash.
| | 06:10 | So again, the parameters that I'm
balancing here, I've got the ambient light
| | 06:14 | levels which are a function of my basic
exposure settings: my shutter speed and aperture.
| | 06:19 | But I'm trying to go for a certain
amount of depth of field, so I've gone to
| | 06:21 | a smaller aperture.
| | 06:23 | Now, I can turn my ISO up and down.
Obviously that changes my exposure in the
| | 06:27 | way that you would expect.
| | 06:29 | However, when my ISO is higher, a little
bit of flashlight goes a lot farther, so
| | 06:34 | you want be very careful if you've
got a really bright flashlight, if you're
| | 06:37 | having trouble controlling it, you're
getting way too much light on there,
| | 06:39 | the way you deal with that is to turn
the ISO down. And you can still control
| | 06:43 | your ambient temperature with
your shutter speed and aperture.
| | 06:47 | If you're dealing with a human subject,
you want to try and keep your shutter
| | 06:49 | speed a little bit lower so that
they don't have to stand there forever.
| | 06:53 | Also note that in addition to a
flashlight, you can use the strobe from your
| | 06:56 | flash, like an external strobe.
| | 06:59 | So we can put her out there and flash a
strobe at her or flash the trees with them.
| | 07:03 | And there, again, we're trying to balance
ISO versus flash power, but we have an
| | 07:07 | additional control, which is we could
dial the power of flash up and down.
| | 07:10 | So this is very basic light painting.
| | 07:12 | It's a way of taking control of a low-
light situation and adding either more light.
| | 07:17 | You can do is to create subtle
effects like we're doing here or really
| | 07:21 | over-the-top effects were things are
lit up far more than they should be.
| | 07:24 | It takes some practice, but it's pretty
easy, and the great thing about digital
| | 07:27 | is you can see your results.
| | 07:28 | So get out there, give it a try,
and see what happens as you play the
| | 07:32 | various parameters.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Light painting: in front of the camera| 00:01 | In the last movie, you saw us paint a
subject in the frame with a flashlight.
| | 00:05 | You couldn't see the flashlight itself, but
you could see the light that was hitting
| | 00:08 | Heather as she sat in the frame.
| | 00:10 | A long exposure like this in low light,
we can create another effect by making
| | 00:14 | the light itself visible. That burns a
nice light into the image which we can
| | 00:19 | then play with. We are
going to try that right now.
| | 00:21 | Jacob is going to go into frame with his
flashlight and do a little bit of light
| | 00:25 | painting directly into the camera, and
I think when that happens, this is all
| | 00:28 | going to make sense to you.
| | 00:28 | Jacob, are you ready? All right!
Jacob: Yeah.
| | 00:33 | Can we kill this light over here?
| | 00:36 | Again, we've got artificial
light on so that you can see me.
| | 00:39 | All right, Jacob, you're
going to have 20 seconds.
| | 00:43 | Now as in the previous example, we have
all--I've already calculated the ambient
| | 00:49 | light exposure settings, so that I
know that with this 20-second exposure, I'm
| | 00:55 | going to have a lot of nice
ambient light on the tree.
| | 00:57 | So, what we're capturing now is that
ambient light plus what he's about to do
| | 01:01 | with his flashlight. And the shutter is
open. So he just turned his flashlight on.
| | 01:08 | He is holding his thumb in front of it
so that it's not too bright, and he's writing.
| | 01:12 | Now if you're real stickler for
penmanship, I want to you to cut him some slack.
| | 01:15 | He is writing in the air with a flashlight.
| | 01:18 | My exposure is not done.
| | 01:19 | He's done writing what he was going
to write and he's run out of frame.
| | 01:22 | Because he is out of frame and the
exposure is still going, we're going to
| | 01:25 | gather enough of the ambient light that
was where he was standing that he will
| | 01:29 | hopefully disappear and all that will
be left is this writing, right, hanging
| | 01:34 | in air. And it's red again because of
his thumb in front of the light. And if his
| | 01:40 | thumb had not been there, from our
experiments just some test shots we done, we
| | 01:43 | found there was just way too much light
coming from the light directly into the camera.
| | 01:47 | Greg, hit the lights.
| | 01:48 | So a very simple example. There are lot of
different things you can do with this technique.
| | 01:52 | Any way that you can get the light in
front of the camera is going to burn
| | 01:56 | an image in. It's fun playing with
sparklers. It's fun throwing light
| | 02:00 | around, twirling it around.
| | 02:01 | This is a great technique to
experiment with. Try shining the light through
| | 02:04 | gels, through your hand, putting
diffusion in it, lots of different things.
| | 02:08 | You can paint images
basically directly onto your image.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Manipulating long shutter speeds| 00:01 | In the last couple of the movies,
you've seen us directly manipulating the
| | 00:04 | light in our scene.
| | 00:05 | You see how we used ISO to control
how much the light we were adding was
| | 00:09 | burning into our scene, and we used a
very long shutter speed to give ourselves
| | 00:14 | lots of time to work.
| | 00:15 | We were still using aperture
to think about depth of field.
| | 00:18 | We set our ambient light first and
then went to work painting with light.
| | 00:23 | We were thinking of light as a
commodity, as something we can pour onto the
| | 00:26 | frame, as something we could
simply add to the image as we chose.
| | 00:30 | This is one of the advantages of low-
light photography, where we can have this
| | 00:34 | long shutter speed that gives us lots
of time to work and that gives us lots of
| | 00:38 | time to slowly add light to
different parts of our scene.
| | 00:41 | I left the crew in the basement last
night with some cameras and they started
| | 00:46 | playing around and had a lot of fun
doing the light-painting type of things
| | 00:51 | that we've already seen,
but while changing the scene before them.
| | 00:55 | They had a camera running and
you can see what's going on.
| | 00:58 | Jacob was turning off the lights.
Josh was standing at the top of the stairs.
| | 01:01 | Now what's going to happen is Jacob
is going to fire a flash at Josh on the
| | 01:06 | stairs and then--there it was--and
Josh is standing in one position.
| | 01:11 | Now Josh is moving.
| | 01:12 | Because it's so dark, the still camera
is not picking up any of his movement, and
| | 01:17 | now Jacob fires a second flash to
capture him in the other position.
| | 01:21 | The shutter has been open the same time.
| | 01:23 | So this is a single image. The lights
are back on. Let's take a look at what
| | 01:25 | they got, and here's the final shot.
| | 01:28 | Josh is shooting himself on the staircase.
| | 01:31 | So it should be pretty obvious to
you how this image was built up.
| | 01:34 | Now, there's no Photoshop work here.
| | 01:36 | It's not multiple exposures.
| | 01:37 | It's this one frame, but one flash
illuminated Josh while he was on the stairs
| | 01:41 | and didn't spill into the
other part of the frame.
| | 01:44 | While still in darkness, Josh came down
the stairs manage not bump in anything,
| | 01:48 | got into next position.
| | 01:49 | Jacob flashed him again.
| | 01:51 | Now for this to work, it was very important
that the flashes didn't bleed into each other,
| | 01:56 | that light was only going into half
the frame of the first shot, so that the
| | 02:00 | other half stayed dark,
and then vice versa after they moved.
| | 02:04 | This is a very simple example
of just one thing you can do.
| | 02:07 | They were playing around a lot.
| | 02:09 | Any source of light is something
that you can paint onto the frame with.
| | 02:13 | Glow sticks, flashlights, cigarette
lighters, any of those kinds of things,
| | 02:19 | anything that casts either direct
or diffuse light can create a really
| | 02:23 | interesting effect when it's
painted onto the sensor like this.
| | 02:27 | Probably the three biggest issues
you're going to face are whether your ambient
| | 02:30 | light levels are too high, whether your
lights are bleeding into each other, and
| | 02:34 | whether you or your light source is
visible when you don't want it to be.
| | 02:38 | You can play around with all those
things by controlling your light better,
| | 02:41 | changing your exposure values to change your
ambient light levels, and so on and so forth.
| | 02:46 | The great thing about this is
you can do it in any dark room.
| | 02:49 | You don't need anything other than an
external flash and to know how to control
| | 02:52 | your camera well enough to
get that long exposure going.
| | 02:55 | Learning to manipulate light like this,
even if you don't ultimately do anything
| | 02:59 | with these kinds of images, it's a great
way to start thinking, again, about light
| | 03:03 | as a commodity, about something
that you collect on the sensor.
| | 03:07 | That's a good mindset to have
for your regular photo work also.
| | 03:11 | It can give you a different perspective
on exposure and how to control naturally
| | 03:15 | occurring light in your scene.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
8. Post-Processing ConsiderationsCorrecting white balance| 00:00 | When you shoot in low light, most
of your images are going to need a
| | 00:04 | white balance correction.
| | 00:06 | Low-light situations play havoc with
auto white balance mechanisms, shifting your
| | 00:09 | image towards red or orange.
| | 00:11 | You can try and be very diligent and
careful and manually white balance at the
| | 00:15 | scene, but sometimes that's not
possible. Sometimes you may not have a white
| | 00:18 | balance card, you may not be able
to get it into the light where you're
| | 00:22 | shooting, or as in the case when we
shot the theatresports show the other
| | 00:26 | night, you maybe dealing with stage
lighting where a light is actually being
| | 00:30 | intentionally colored in different
ways and that coloring is changing
| | 00:33 | throughout the shoot.
| | 00:34 | Even if I could have gotten on stage
ahead of time and done a white balance, the
| | 00:39 | light was changing throughout the show
and so that white balance would have gone
| | 00:43 | bad after a scene change and
then I'd be back where I started.
| | 00:46 | So if you're shooting RAW, this all
gets much easier, because with a RAW file,
| | 00:51 | you can change white balance after the fact--
and we are going to try that right now.
| | 00:55 | I have the great good fortune before
the show the other night to have the
| | 00:57 | opportunity to get on stage with the
actors and shoot some close-ups and shoot
| | 01:01 | some headshots and things like that.
| | 01:03 | So let's open one of those up right now.
| | 01:05 | I am in Bridge. I am double-clicking on the
file to open it up in Camera RAW in Photoshop.
| | 01:09 | We're going to be doing our
editing in this course in Photoshop.
| | 01:13 | If you use a different editor, say
Lightroom, or Aperture, Capture NX, iPhoto
| | 01:18 | any number of other RAW converters,
you're going to find the same feature set
| | 01:22 | that we're using here; it's just going to
be a different interface and different tools.
| | 01:25 | So here you can see the image
is shifted in lots of weird ways.
| | 01:30 | Their flesh tones are way too reddish
and orange. There is a yellowish cast to
| | 01:34 | the greens. This white shirt doesn't really
look white. So this is a case of bad white balance.
| | 01:40 | Fortunately, I have a lot of
different ways to go to correct this.
| | 01:43 | Over here in Camera Raw, I
have my White Balance controls.
| | 01:46 | White Balance is always going to be
comprised of at least two sliders: a
| | 01:49 | Temperature slider and a Tint slider.
Sometimes this will just be called
| | 01:53 | White Balance and Tint.
| | 01:55 | The Temperature slider shifts from
blue to yellow and is a very finely
| | 01:59 | controlled slider; there is a
lot of varying degrees in there.
| | 02:02 | The Tint slider shifts from green to
magenta and is a very, very subtle adjustment.
| | 02:08 | You're not going to see a huge
change as you move this slider around.
| | 02:11 | In Camera Raw, I also have this
pop-up menu of preset white balances.
| | 02:15 | This is just like the preset white
balances that I might find in my camera.
| | 02:19 | If I pop this open, you see Auto,
Daylight, Cloudy, Shade, Tungsten. Those
| | 02:22 | should look familiar.
| | 02:23 | Those are probably the White Balance
presets that you have on your camera,
| | 02:26 | or something similar.
| | 02:28 | I am going to go over here to
Tungsten. There is no entry here for stage
| | 02:31 | lighting, but these lights were probably
tungsten lights, and if I pick that up,
| | 02:35 | things get pretty good.
| | 02:36 | This is definitely better, but they are still
little too blue with a kind of a cold image.
| | 02:41 | I am going to put it back to As Shot,
which means it's going to go back to what
| | 02:45 | the camera's Auto White Balance had chosen.
| | 02:48 | I have another option. I can just skew
these sliders around by hand, but that can
| | 02:52 | be really hard to do accurately.
It's hard to know where to stop.
| | 02:56 | But, up here I have a White Balance
eyedropper--it's this thing right here--and
| | 03:00 | if I click it on something in the image
that is supposed to be white or ideally
| | 03:04 | middle gray, then it will sample that
color and use that as the basis for an
| | 03:08 | accurate white balance calculation.
| | 03:11 | Now, when your color is way of whack,
it can be difficult, what in the image is
| | 03:14 | supposed to be white or gray.
| | 03:16 | But, it's usually a safe bet that
someone's teeth or the whites of their eyes
| | 03:19 | are supposed to be white.
| | 03:21 | So I am going to zoom in here. I am
just using Command+Plus--that would be
| | 03:24 | Ctrl+Plus on Windows, to zoom in. And I
have got some teeth here that I can use.
| | 03:29 | I am going to go for the whites
of the eyes though, right up here.
| | 03:31 | So I am just positioning my dropper
there, clicking once, and there is my
| | 03:35 | white balance adjustment.
| | 03:36 | Again, it's a little cool, maybe a little blue.
| | 03:38 | I am going to click around in some other
places, some other whites, and see what I get.
| | 03:41 | I am not getting a big shift on
any of these; in fact, they are not
| | 03:45 | really changing it all.
| | 03:46 | So I think that's pretty good.
| | 03:48 | Now, white balance is an objective
measure, but subjectively, correct white
| | 03:54 | balance may not be the best thing for the image.
| | 03:56 | It may not be exactly what you want.
| | 03:58 | This is definitely better.
| | 03:59 | It's always best to start with accurate
white balance and then you can warm it
| | 04:03 | up or cool it down to your personal taste.
| | 04:06 | I am going to go from here to a little
warmer by just sliding my Temperature
| | 04:09 | slider a tiny bit to the right.
| | 04:11 | As I said, it's a very finely
grained tool here. I don't need much of an
| | 04:14 | adjustment, and my image is warmed up.
| | 04:17 | Now, I can go on to the rest of my edits.
| | 04:20 | Normally, we make tonal corrections
before color corrections, because very often
| | 04:24 | correcting tone--that is, correcting
the black point and white point and
| | 04:27 | contrast in your image--very often
making those corrections will correct the
| | 04:31 | color in your image.
| | 04:33 | White balance takes things so out of
whack that you need to get it taken care
| | 04:36 | of first for a few reasons: one, if you cannot
correct it, you might want to abandon the image;
| | 04:42 | two, all of these adjustments that I
make with these sliders right here are
| | 04:46 | basically free edits.
| | 04:47 | They don't degrade my image in any way.
They don't use up any of the editing
| | 04:52 | latitude. They don't move my data around
in any way that is going to ever result
| | 04:57 | in an artifact or tone
breaks or anything like that.
| | 05:00 | Since my other edits will be doing
that, it's great to get color as correct
| | 05:04 | as possible with a white balance
adjustment, because it leaves me a lot of
| | 05:07 | editing room later.
| | 05:09 | So this image is adjusted. I am going
to hit the Done button here, which sucks
| | 05:12 | those edits away, and now when I am back
in Bridge. You can see my thumbnail just
| | 05:16 | changed there to show the
corrected, updated version.
| | 05:20 | However, while I was standing there
shooting this particular scene, I shot a lot
| | 05:23 | of frames; that's what all
of these images are here.
| | 05:26 | They were all shot under exactly the
same lighting, so they really need just
| | 05:30 | exactly the same white balance correction.
| | 05:32 | So I am going to select all of these.
I am going to click here to select the
| | 05:35 | first one, then Shift+Click on the last
one, and that will select everything in
| | 05:38 | between, and now I am going to right-click.
| | 05:41 | On the Macintosh, if you don't have a
two-button mouse, you can Ctrl+Click.
| | 05:45 | When I right-click, I get this pop-up menu.
| | 05:47 | If I scroll down a ways, I will see
Develop Settings, and in here there is
| | 05:52 | Camera Raw Defaults, which will set
the image to some default settings that
| | 05:56 | Camera Raw has, or I can go to previous
conversion. That will simply apply the
| | 06:01 | last set of raw corrections that
I made, and I know the last set was
| | 06:05 | appropriate for this lighting situation.
| | 06:06 | So I am going to choose that.
| | 06:08 | And after I do, these images
just start appearing correct.
| | 06:12 | It takes the edits that I made to this image
and automatically applies them to all of these.
| | 06:17 | Let me just pop one of those up larger
here, and you can see, sure enough, that's
| | 06:21 | correct white balance.
| | 06:22 | This is another one of the great
advantages of working in RAW, so I can very
| | 06:25 | easily lift edits off of one RAW file
and drop them on another. And this is true
| | 06:30 | with Lightroom and Aperture
and many other RAW converters.
| | 06:34 | There is one other way of making that edit.
| | 06:35 | Let me show you. I am going to
come down here to another image.
| | 06:39 | Again, we've got a white balance problem,
and again, I can fix this very easily.
| | 06:43 | I am going to grab my White Balance eyedropper.
| | 06:45 | In Camera Raw, there are two droppers:
there is the White Balance dropper, which
| | 06:49 | is this one right here, and then
there is the Color Sampler tool. That's a
| | 06:52 | different dropper, and that lets me
measure a color in different places.
| | 06:55 | That's not what I want; I
want the White Balance dropper.
| | 06:58 | Now, I am just going to click in the
whites of the eyes again, and boom!
| | 07:01 | My white balance is much better.
I am going to now warm it up a tiny bit.
| | 07:05 | Now, this image needs a lot of other edits.
| | 07:07 | I am not going to worry about those
right now though. I am just going to hit the
| | 07:09 | Done button and white balance
is correct now for this image.
| | 07:14 | But again, I shot a lot of
other frames in that same lighting.
| | 07:18 | So what I am going to do here now is
go up to the Edit menu and you will see,
| | 07:23 | here is another copy of
that Develop Settings submenu.
| | 07:27 | And if I pop that open, I find
a couple of additional options:
| | 07:30 | Copy Camera Raw Settings
and Paste Camera Raw Settings.
| | 07:32 | So I am going to copy these settings, and
I am going to select these three images.
| | 07:37 | I am stopping here because there seems
to be a color shift in these next ones,
| | 07:41 | so I am going to want to
do a different edit there.
| | 07:43 | Now, with those selected, I am going
to go up here to the Edit menu, choose
| | 07:45 | Develop Settings again, and this time
choose Paste Camera Raw Settings.
| | 07:50 | Now, in this menu, when I choose Paste
Camera Raw Settings, I get this dialog
| | 07:54 | box that lets me select exactly what
settings from the Camera Raw dialog box
| | 07:59 | that I want to paste.
| | 08:01 | I can go up here and just say White
Balance and that will check off only the
| | 08:04 | White Balance settings.
| | 08:06 | If I wanted to also take maybe a
crop if I had made one, or an exposure
| | 08:10 | adjustment, I could put those in, so I
can control exactly what Camera Raw edits
| | 08:14 | are moving from one image to another.
| | 08:16 | Hit OK and again, those get applied, and
now all of these images are corrected.
| | 08:21 | So I can very quickly go through my
entire shoot and get white balance set
| | 08:25 | properly and then go back
through and work on my other edits.
| | 08:29 | So again, most of your low-light edits,
and most of your low-light images are
| | 08:33 | probably going to need a white balance
adjustment unless you are very diligent
| | 08:37 | about shooting manual
white balance at the scene.
| | 08:39 | But, if you're working with Raw,
pretty much no matter what RAW converter you
| | 08:42 | are using, you're going to have a very
easy time of correcting that tricky low-
| | 08:47 | light white balance.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Correcting white balance with a gray card| 00:00 | The White Balance eyedropper in Camera
Raw, or really just about any other RAW
| | 00:05 | converter software, is a great way to
fix white balance: single-click and bang,
| | 00:09 | your colors all fall into place.
| | 00:11 | The problem with working in low light
is it's often very difficult to tell what
| | 00:16 | in the image was originally gray or white.
| | 00:19 | In other words, what is a good target to
be sampling off of for your white balance?
| | 00:23 | Also, because you are working in low
light, you probably got your ISO up. If you
| | 00:28 | are working with a camera that's very
noisy, even though you might see a patch
| | 00:32 | on the screen that you know is supposed
to be gray, the pixel you click on might
| | 00:35 | actually be a green or purple color.
| | 00:37 | So it can just be a little bit difficult
to work with that White Balance dropper
| | 00:41 | when you're shooting in low light.
| | 00:42 | If you are very picky about white
balance, if you want to be sure that you can
| | 00:46 | come home and very easily correct your
white balance consider carrying a white
| | 00:50 | balance card with you.
| | 00:51 | That's what I did here.
| | 00:53 | I shot this image. I was just walking
around the street. It was raining and I
| | 00:56 | saw this and I took it and I thought
okay, I think that might be a keeper, but
| | 01:00 | I'm going to want to correct the white balance.
| | 01:01 | So I pulled out my gray card and held
it up in front of me--this is what it
| | 01:05 | looks like--and I took a picture of it.
| | 01:07 | As long as I'm in the same light as my
subject then this will work, just holding
| | 01:11 | at arm's length and
taking a picture of it like this.
| | 01:14 | At nighttime, I'm almost always going
to be in the same light as my subject,
| | 01:17 | because we're all under the streetlights.
| | 01:19 | This is a white balance card made
by a whibal.com. That's W-H-I-B-A-L.
| | 01:25 | There are lots of things I like about it.
| | 01:26 | It's truly spectrally neutral,
meaning no matter what angle I look at, I'm
| | 01:30 | going to get a real gray.
| | 01:32 | It's gray all the way through, so if the
surface gets scuffed, I can just sand it
| | 01:35 | down and there's gray underneath. And it floats.
| | 01:38 | So if I ever fall off a boat I can
actually use it as a little floatation device.
| | 01:41 | So what can I do here now that
I have this actual gray sample?
| | 01:44 | Well I can grab my White Balance dropper
and click on it, and my image is corrected.
| | 01:50 | That's great, except I didn't
really want a picture of a gray card;
| | 01:54 | I wanted this other picture over here.
| | 01:57 | So there are a few different options.
| | 01:59 | I could click with my White Balance
dropper, take note of the values that it
| | 02:05 | filled in over here--Temperature 2000,
Tint, -8--and then I could go type those
| | 02:10 | into this other image.
| | 02:12 | There is an easier way though: if I, say,
Select All over here and then hit the
| | 02:17 | Synchronize button I can tell it that
any of these edits that are checked, any
| | 02:22 | of these edits that I make will be
done to all of the images that are
| | 02:25 | currently selected.
| | 02:27 | I'm just going to go ahead and hit OK,
because the only edit I am going to make
| | 02:29 | right now is white balance.
| | 02:30 | So now I just click here, and you can see
that now over here my white balance is correct.
| | 02:35 | It sampled the gray card, which I know
is correct for the lighting in this image
| | 02:40 | because I was standing in
the same place for both shots.
| | 02:42 | I sampled the gray card, figured out
what the correct Temperature and Tint
| | 02:45 | values were, and applied that to all
of the selected synchronized images.
| | 02:49 | As soon as I click on an individual
image, they are no longer synchronized.
| | 02:52 | There are other ways that I could do
this same thing. I could click on the gray
| | 02:56 | card to correct it and then back in
Bridge, if I'm using Bridge as my browser, I
| | 03:00 | could copy that edit off of
one image, paste it onto another.
| | 03:03 | If I'm using Aperture, there are ways of
copying and pasting images. Same thing
| | 03:06 | for Lightroom, same thing for Capture NX.
A lot of raw converters provide this capability.
| | 03:11 | You can simply look at
yours to determine how to do it.
| | 03:14 | The important thing is this only
works if you've got this reference shot.
| | 03:19 | So I don't necessarily walk around at
night shooting gray cards wherever I am; I
| | 03:23 | don't worry about it until I've
taken the shot that I want.
| | 03:26 | Another thing I could use this for is
if I know that I'm going to be in mostly
| | 03:29 | the same lighting all the time, I could
go ahead do a manual white balance in my
| | 03:32 | camera with that gray card and then I
know that I'm not going to have to do any
| | 03:36 | post-processing at all.
| | 03:37 | Personally, I actually find this easier
than dealing with manual white balance.
| | 03:40 | So that's whibal.com, W-H-I-B-A-L.
| | 03:44 | This is a great technique for getting
accurate color when you're working in
| | 03:48 | low light.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Correcting white balance of JPEG images| 00:01 | If you were shooting JPEG images, you'll
still need to correct your white balance
| | 00:05 | most likely, if you've been shooting in
low light, unless you were able to get an
| | 00:08 | accurate white balance while you were shooting.
| | 00:12 | Unfortunately, you don't have as much
latitude for white balance correction
| | 00:14 | when you're working with a JPEG file,
but in Photoshop, correcting white
| | 00:18 | balance in a JPEG image is much easier
than it used to be, because you can now
| | 00:22 | actually do that in Camera Raw.
| | 00:24 | Now that may sound little
strange, but take a look at this.
| | 00:27 | I have a JPEG of one of these images
here in Bridge, and you can see that the
| | 00:32 | white balance is
definitely off. It's way too red.
| | 00:35 | If I go up to the File menu in Bridge,
there's an option to Open in Camera Raw--
| | 00:41 | or I can hit Command+R or Ctrl+R--and
when I do that, this JPEG images is
| | 00:45 | actually opened in the Camera Raw
dialog box just as if there was a RAW file.
| | 00:50 | However, some of these sliders don't
work the same way as they would if I was
| | 00:55 | working with a RAW file.
| | 00:56 | For example, I have no highlight recovery,
but I can use the white balance controls.
| | 01:00 | So I'm going to grab the white
balance dropper over here, and I'm going to
| | 01:04 | do what I did before.
| | 01:05 | I'm going to try and find something
white or gray. I'm going to go with the
| | 01:08 | white of an eye again and click right there
and right away my image is pretty much there.
| | 01:15 | Now this is an image that worked very well;
| | 01:17 | it's managed to clean up pretty
handily. Not every JPEG image will.
| | 01:21 | If the white balance is way off, you may
find color shifts in one place or another.
| | 01:25 | You'll also find that the way the
sliders work, they are a little bit chunkier;
| | 01:30 | they're a little more blunt.
| | 01:31 | They don't have as many fine gradations.
| | 01:34 | Most importantly though the big
difference here between correcting this white
| | 01:38 | balance in a JPEG and correcting white
balance in a RAW file is that I've used
| | 01:43 | up a bunch of image editing
latitude here with this edit.
| | 01:46 | If I now go into Photoshop and try to
do more edits, I'm going to start seeing
| | 01:50 | posterizing and tone breaks much
sooner than I would have with a RAW file.
| | 01:54 | Nevertheless, I managed to save this
image. Now I can go on with the rest of
| | 01:58 | my editing.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Blending exposures with different white balances| 00:01 | Earlier in this course, we looked at
slow sync photography, what your camera may
| | 00:04 | call night portrait photography.
| | 00:06 | That's where we have a flash firing in
conjunction with a long exposure so that
| | 00:10 | we get flash-illuminated
foreground and a well-exposed background.
| | 00:14 | As you saw earlier, the problem with
that can be you get your normal reddish
| | 00:18 | orange low-light thing going on in the
background and kind of a bluish-white
| | 00:21 | light going on in the foreground,
and they just don't mix very well.
| | 00:24 | We showed you how you can gel your
flash to compensate for that problem, but
| | 00:27 | there are going to be times when you
may not have happened to be carrying gels
| | 00:31 | with you or you're just too lazy
or you don't have time or whatnot.
| | 00:35 | So there is a way that we
can fix is in post-production.
| | 00:37 | I'm here in Camera Raw
and I've got this file open.
| | 00:40 | I'm going to brighten this up
because it's looking a little dark to me.
| | 00:42 | Now you may think, well, all I have
to do is adjust the white balance and
| | 00:47 | everything will be okay.
| | 00:48 | Well, of course, if I adjust the
white balance aiming to correct his skin
| | 00:51 | tone, I'm going to end up--I can
warm him up, but I've warmed to the
| | 00:55 | background up even more.
| | 00:56 | I would like to be able to edit
these white balances independently.
| | 00:59 | Now you may have already thought
through this and gone, oh okay, maybe what I
| | 01:03 | would do is write out two different
files from the same RAW file and composite
| | 01:08 | them and change the white balances.
| | 01:10 | And that's exactly what we're going
to do, except we're going to do it in a
| | 01:12 | really cool way, using a
Photoshop feature called Smart Objects.
| | 01:16 | So I'm going to adjust this
correctly just for overall exposure.
| | 01:20 | I'm not really worried about white
balance yet; I'll fix that later.
| | 01:23 | And now what I want to do
is open this in Photoshop.
| | 01:25 | If I hold down the Shift key in
Camera Raw, watch what happens to this
| | 01:28 | Open button down here.
| | 01:30 | It changes from Open Image to Open Object.
| | 01:33 | If you can't remember that, don't worry.
| | 01:34 | The tooltip for this button, if I just
hover the mouse over it, will tell me
| | 01:38 | Open as a normal image.
| | 01:39 | Option+Click to open
without updating image metadata.
| | 01:42 | Shift+Click the open as a Smart Object.
| | 01:44 | So I'm going to do that, and that's going
to pull the image into Photoshop, but in
| | 01:49 | a very particular way.
| | 01:50 | It's going to create a unique
kind of layer called a Smart Object.
| | 01:54 | This is basically a link
back to the original RAW file.
| | 01:58 | There's no actual
processed data here in my image.
| | 02:02 | You can see it's a Smart Object
because it's got this little badge in the
| | 02:04 | lower right-hand corner.
| | 02:06 | So what I had suggested before is
that we have two copies of the RAW file
| | 02:10 | layered, that we build a mask for, so
that we can composite them to combine these
| | 02:15 | two different images.
| | 02:16 | That's what we're going to do here, but we
want two different copies of this Smart Object.
| | 02:20 | So with this selected, I'm going to go
up here to the Layer menu and down to
| | 02:24 | Smart Objects and say New Smart Object
via Copy, and that's just going to create
| | 02:29 | a duplicate of that Smart Object.
| | 02:31 | Note that you cannot do that same
thing by simply dragging this Smart Object
| | 02:36 | down to here, the way you
normally duplicate a layer.
| | 02:39 | If you do that, you get two identical
copies of the Smart Object and they stay
| | 02:43 | linked together so that any change
made to one happens to the other.
| | 02:46 | We don't want that;
| | 02:47 | we want two discrete objects.
| | 02:48 | Now here's what's really
cool about a Smart Object.
| | 02:52 | If I double-click on this
Smart Object, it takes me back into Camera Raw.
| | 02:58 | Now I can adjust all of my RAW parameters.
| | 03:00 | So I'm going to set the white balance
correct for the foreground of the image.
| | 03:05 | So I'm going to just warm Jacob up here.
| | 03:08 | Now that's sending my background kind of nuts.
I'm not going to worry too much about that.
| | 03:13 | I am just going to put him right there.
| | 03:16 | I've got some nice gray here on his
coat. Let me see what happens if I
| | 03:20 | white-balance dropper on that.
| | 03:21 | Yeah, I think I'd like it warmer than that.
| | 03:25 | So I'm going to punch that up to
there, and when I'm done, I say OK.
| | 03:29 | Now it reprocesses that RAW file to
show me a different view of that Smart
| | 03:34 | Object, one with my new white balance.
| | 03:36 | Now I'm going to hide that layer and
go down here and double-click on this
| | 03:39 | Smart Object, and that is going to take
me back into Raw and let me have at my
| | 03:45 | normal raw settings again.
| | 03:47 | So I'm going to cool the background
down. And this is a little tricky to figure
| | 03:51 | out because it's hard not to look
at him and see how wrong he is going.
| | 03:55 | But I can always come back and correct
this later once I have my mask in place.
| | 03:58 | So with that done, I'm going to say OK.
| | 04:00 | So now I have two different copies of
the same RAW file, each with different
| | 04:03 | white balance settings.
| | 04:04 | But those white balance settings are live.
| | 04:06 | I can change them whenever I want
and everything in my image re-renders.
| | 04:10 | So I'm going to turn my top layer back on.
| | 04:13 | Now my upper layer is completely
obscuring my lower layer, so I can't see any of
| | 04:18 | that nice corrected background.
| | 04:19 | But I can easily reveal that nicely
corrected background by going up to Layer
| | 04:25 | and saying Layer Mask.
| | 04:27 | I'm going to say Reveal All.
| | 04:28 | That's going to reveal all of this upper layer,
so I'm now seeing still only the upper layer.
| | 04:34 | In this case, the mask is telling me which
parts of this image are currently visible.
| | 04:39 | Because it's white, because I can
see everything through that mask, I'm
| | 04:42 | seeing all of the image.
| | 04:43 | So I'm going to grab my brush and some
black paint and now where I paint with
| | 04:48 | the brush, you can see the
white balance is changing.
| | 04:51 | Now the white balance of
course is not actually changing.
| | 04:54 | What's happened is I'm stopping up that
part of the mask and it's revealing the
| | 04:59 | image below that has correct white
balance, or in this case, the Smart Object
| | 05:03 | below that has correct white balance.
| | 05:06 | I'm going to rough this in. I'm not
going to do this as carefully as you might
| | 05:11 | normally, just so that we can get through this.
| | 05:13 | I need to obviously paint a
little more carefully around him.
| | 05:17 | Note though that these kinds
of masks are pretty forgiving.
| | 05:21 | I can actually rough it in a little bit
around his hair. I don't have to paint
| | 05:25 | perfectly around each and every strand of hair.
| | 05:30 | It looks like I did spill over a little
bit there, so I'm going to correct that
| | 05:32 | by switching back to white paint and
painting in some of that color there.
| | 05:36 | So I'll need to work that transition some.
| | 05:38 | Now we're looking better. We're looking, we've
got an image with a background white balance that looks
| | 05:43 | correct, and he doesn't look so weirdly white.
| | 05:46 | With my mask in place though, I can now
refine my white balances, and I want to
| | 05:50 | cool this background down a little more,
| | 05:52 | so that means double-
clicking on this lower Smart Object.
| | 05:56 | Note that I need to double-click on the icon.
| | 05:59 | If I double-click over here, I
just end up editing the layer.
| | 06:02 | And as long as I'm the editing
the layer, why don't I name it?
| | 06:05 | I'll call this Background
and we'll call this Jacob.
| | 06:10 | I'm going to double-click here.
It takes me back into Camera Raw.
| | 06:15 | There's nothing special about this;
| | 06:18 | this is exactly as if
I'd just opened the image.
| | 06:20 | Anything I do here is exactly like
it would be normally in Camera Raw.
| | 06:25 | It's just that it maintains
everything else that I've done inside my
| | 06:29 | Photoshop document.
| | 06:30 | It's re-rendering the RAW file and now
when it's done, my background just cooled
| | 06:34 | down a little bit more.
| | 06:35 | I could, if I wanted, go in and
refine my foreground white balance.
| | 06:39 | It can be a lot of tweaking and I may
need to print the image to know exactly
| | 06:42 | what the correct white balance settings
are, but this is a way that I can have
| | 06:46 | discrete control over
foreground and background white balance.
| | 06:50 | Obviously, with Smart Objects, I can
edit any other RAW parameter, so this would
| | 06:53 | also be a way of adjusting exposure
differently in foreground and background.
| | 06:58 | If there is something else that I
can only do in Raw, like maybe highlight
| | 07:02 | recovery, and I need discrete control of
that in one part of the image, masking
| | 07:06 | stacked Smart Objects is a great way
to get that separate discrete control of
| | 07:11 | different RAW parameters.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Brightening shadows| 00:01 | Working in low light you are very often
going to be facing images that are too dark
| | 00:05 | when you get to post-production.
It's just kind of the nature of the situation.
| | 00:08 | No matter how careful you are, there
will be times when you miscalculate your
| | 00:11 | exposure or you run into parameters
that keep you from shooting an image
| | 00:15 | that's bright enough.
| | 00:16 | Here, I've got an exposure
that was a 30th of a second.
| | 00:20 | I was at ISO 16, so I didn't
want to take my ISO, ISO 1600,
| | 00:24 | I didn't want to take my ISO up in any higher.
| | 00:26 | I was using a lens that the maximum
aperture was f/4. I didn't have a tripod with me.
| | 00:31 | There wasn't much I could do;
I had to shoot this image dark.
| | 00:33 | I want to just quickly go over some of the
brightening tools that you have at your disposal.
| | 00:37 | There are lot of them, spread
through Camera Raw in Photoshop.
| | 00:40 | None of them are necessarily the right
or wrong choice for any given situation.
| | 00:44 | You will probably use a balance of them.
| | 00:46 | So just kind of as review, I thought we
would go over some of the tools that you
| | 00:49 | have at hand when it comes down
to brighten up an image like this.
| | 00:53 | Curiously, in Camera Raw, one of the
quickest, easiest way is to immediately
| | 00:58 | brighten up an image is to hit the Blacks slider.
| | 01:00 | By default, Blacks always comes in
with a value of 5, which is pretty
| | 01:05 | aggressive, and you can see here in my
histogram that I am really clipping a
| | 01:08 | lot of black information.
| | 01:10 | If I just drag the Blacks back to 0,
suddenly I have got a whole lot of extra
| | 01:15 | latitude down here at the
bottom of my histogram to play with.
| | 01:18 | Let me put that back where it was, and
you can see, watch these areas in here,
| | 01:22 | which are very, very black.
| | 01:24 | Suddenly it turns out there's some
more detail there in those transitions. That can be handy.
| | 01:28 | Of course, in Camera Raw, my primary
tool for brightening and darkening is the
| | 01:32 | Exposure slider, which works just like
dialing an exposure compensation on my
| | 01:37 | camera; it's measured in stops.
| | 01:38 | So here I just brightened
the image by 1.05 stops.
| | 01:42 | I can, of course, go the other
direction if I need to darken something.
| | 01:45 | The Exposure slider does double
duty as a highlight recovery tool.
| | 01:49 | If I drag to the left, you can see that
these clipped highlights over here go away.
| | 01:54 | The problem with doing this is that by
recovering highlights this way, my image
| | 01:58 | has gone much, much darker,
way too dark to really be usable.
| | 02:02 | So instead, I am going to
put this back over here.
| | 02:04 | I am going to brighten my image
back up and not recover my highlights.
| | 02:08 | So that way, instead, I am
going to use the Recovery slider.
| | 02:11 | Now I understand at this
point, we are not brightening;
| | 02:13 | we are actually darkening some
highlights with the Recovery slider.
| | 02:15 | But if you look here, you can see
that I have definitely got some clipping.
| | 02:18 | If I turn on the Highlight clipping
warning, it's pretty much where you were
| | 02:22 | going to expect it; it's in these
bright streetlights. I'm going to turn that off.
| | 02:27 | They've got a really big
diffuse glow around them.
| | 02:28 | You may decide you would like that,
but there's nothing wrong with that
| | 02:31 | particularly in a low-light image.
But I want to see what it looks like if I just
| | 02:33 | dial my highlight recovery up, and
there that's pulled it way down, giving me
| | 02:39 | some more detail in there. I think I am going
to keep it like that because I am going to be brightening
| | 02:42 | other parts of the image. That gives me
some latitude to brighten these things up
| | 02:45 | without them going too far.
| | 02:47 | So that's looking good.
| | 02:48 | Fill light is kind of like
firing a giant flash into my image.
| | 02:53 | It looks for things in the image that
it thinks are shadows and it brightens
| | 02:57 | them. As I dial this to the right,
shadows in the image get brighter.
| | 03:02 | Now there is a very interesting
distinction here between shadows and blacks.
| | 03:05 | This is not a shift in my black point,
because if you will note, this black
| | 03:09 | water right here is not
brightening as I pump in the fill light.
| | 03:15 | It's brightening a little bit on the
edges, but for the most part, it's correctly
| | 03:18 | identifying things that are simply
shadow,s and it's brightening up and it's
| | 03:21 | pulling some detail out of them.
| | 03:22 | So this can be a very, very
valuable tool for brightening.
| | 03:26 | Finally, I have the Brightness
slider, which adjusts--it's basically
| | 03:30 | the midpoint in levels.
| | 03:32 | It adjusts the brightness of my middle
tones and tries not to alter black or white.
| | 03:37 | So by sliding the Brightness slider up,
I can brighten the middle values without
| | 03:43 | worrying about washing out my blacks.
| | 03:45 | So now that I have got some more
brightness in here--and I am brightening this
| | 03:48 | up a little bit more than what I think
looks right to my eye, because I am going
| | 03:52 | to print it that I know that as I print
it, things are going to darken by half
| | 03:55 | to maybe even a stop, depending on
the type of paper I am going to use.
| | 03:58 | Now I see that, well, my
blacks are really a little weak.
| | 04:01 | So I am going to start
putting my blacks back in here.
| | 04:03 | Whoa! The Blacks slider is
a really blunt instrument.
| | 04:06 | It takes very little motion to
get a lot of results from it.
| | 04:10 | That's looking pretty good.
| | 04:11 | Now you have noticed I've ignored the
white balance situation, and that was
| | 04:14 | partly because it was so dark
| | 04:15 | I wasn't sure what white balance was,
but also because I'm seeing this image as
| | 04:19 | a black-and-white image.
| | 04:21 | So do I really need to correct white balance
if I am just going to go to black and white?
| | 04:24 | I typically say yes, just because it's
good to have more accurate results, more
| | 04:29 | accurate color when I go
into my grayscale conversion.
| | 04:32 | But in low light, it's actually
really pretty critical to have good white
| | 04:35 | balance, because very often your
white balance will be skewed so far that
| | 04:40 | reds, things will turn really red and orange
in your image, and they will start to posterize.
| | 04:43 | You will actually lose detail in tem.
| | 04:45 | By resetting your white balance to
where it needs to be, you know that you're
| | 04:48 | getting back a lot of detail in red and
orange areas, the areas that are blown
| | 04:51 | out real bad, and that might be the
detail that you want when you go to your
| | 04:54 | black and white conversion.
| | 04:56 | So those are some of the
brightening tools that I have in Camera Raw.
| | 05:00 | Let's go ahead and move on into
Photoshop, where I have a couple of other
| | 05:04 | tools at my disposal.
| | 05:05 | And I will go ahead and do my
black-and-white conversion here.
| | 05:08 | So right away, it's surprising to
see with my white balance correction
| | 05:12 | how accurate my color is.
| | 05:13 | It's great that I have got
green in here on these trees.
| | 05:16 | My eye really couldn't tell that
was green while I was at the location.
| | 05:19 | I am going to go ahead and dial
in my black-and-white conversion.
| | 05:23 | If you're not used to working in black
and white, if you don't have a lot of
| | 05:25 | experience with black-and-white
photography, you might want to take a look at my
| | 05:28 | Foundations of Photography:
Black and White course.
| | 05:30 | It will work you through all of the
particulars of dealing with black-and-white
| | 05:35 | images and why you might
like working in black and white.
| | 05:39 | So that gives me an initial hit of my tone.
| | 05:41 | Now I would like to do some
other brightening options.
| | 05:44 | I have something very akin to fill light.
| | 05:46 | I am going to duplicate my
background layer to make a copy of it, because
| | 05:51 | this next edit is going to be
destructive, and I want to know I can back out
| | 05:54 | of it if I need to.
| | 05:55 | Then I want to go up here to
Image > Adjustments > Shadows/Highlights.
| | 05:58 | Now, when I pull up this dialog box,
my image is going to go all wonky.
| | 06:02 | Don't worry about that.
| | 06:04 | Pull this up and right away it looks terrible.
| | 06:06 | That's because the default Shadows
slider or the default value for the Shadows
| | 06:10 | slider is way out of whack.
| | 06:11 | I want to put that back at 0.
| | 06:13 | This Shadow slider is just like
the Fill Light slider in Capture Raw.
| | 06:17 | It looks for things that are
shadows and it brightens them.
| | 06:21 | What's nice about this is
I have a few more options.
| | 06:23 | I can control what is a shadow and
how much brightening to apply to it.
| | 06:28 | You can find out more about these
particular sliders in the Photoshop Help screen.
| | 06:31 | I am going to turn off the More
Options for now, because what I am actually
| | 06:35 | interested in here is this Highlights slider.
| | 06:38 | I want to see what it will do to
these bright highlights, because this can
| | 06:40 | sometimes be away of pulling some
highlight areas more under control, and
| | 06:45 | you can see it's pulled--it's done a good
job of pulling those haloes down a little bit.
| | 06:48 | In this image, I actually like the haloes
so I am going to keep them.
| | 06:51 | So Shadows/Highlights is one option you have.
| | 06:54 | Of course, the other are all the
traditional toning controls that you would
| | 06:57 | always use, predominantly Levels and Curves.
| | 07:00 | I am going to ditch this layer
because we don't need it, because I am not
| | 07:02 | actually going to do that brightening.
And I am going to come in here and add
| | 07:05 | a levels adjustment.
| | 07:07 | I can see here that my white point is
set over here at this little spike, and
| | 07:12 | that's a good place for my white
point if I want to be sure that I'm not
| | 07:15 | overexposing these things.
| | 07:16 | But it's very important when you're
looking at the histogram to pay attention to
| | 07:19 | what the significant data in the image is.
| | 07:21 | Yes, there is data in here.
| | 07:23 | I can see a tiny little line of pixels
right there. But that data represents
| | 07:27 | really just these halos around these lights,
and I don't really care about those so much.
| | 07:32 | So I'm going to go ahead and pull my
white point all the way over to here,
| | 07:35 | because I'm assuming that all of the
stuff, these very, very brightest tones, are
| | 07:40 | simply specular highlights and other
halos and things, and I'm worried about
| | 07:43 | getting all of these
middle gray values set properly.
| | 07:46 | So I think my significant data
probably doesn't start till about right here.
| | 07:49 | I want to bump my black point in a
little bit and maybe adjust the mids.
| | 07:55 | Let me give you a before and after there.
| | 07:57 | That's before, that's after.
| | 07:59 | So you see that I've really taken that
dingy haze off those midtones there and
| | 08:04 | pumped up the contrast in
the middle parts of the image.
| | 08:06 | Now, I have also blown my lights out a bunch.
| | 08:09 | That's a really easy thing to fix
because I have my layer mask right here.
| | 08:12 | So I am going to switch to black paint, grab
a paintbrush, and I want a really big brush.
| | 08:20 | I can really just cheat this one a lot.
| | 08:21 | I am going to stamp some black paint
on there and on there, and that's going
| | 08:26 | to take this levels adjustment off of
these lights and put them back to the
| | 08:32 | glow they had before.
| | 08:33 | This levels adjustment also blew out
this area, this reflection right here. I
| | 08:37 | am just going to tone it back down by
filling in that part of the mask, and there we go.
| | 08:41 | So, levels and curves are going to be,
in Photoshop, your predominant toning
| | 08:47 | controls, your brightening controls.
| | 08:49 | In conjunction with Camera Raw, you've
really got all the power you need to get
| | 08:53 | your middle tones, your whites, your
blacks, get them all back where they need
| | 08:56 | to be and get them working together.
| | 08:58 | If you get stuck trying to figure out how to
isolate an edit, don't forget about layer masks.
| | 09:02 | They are really an easy way to punch
very particular amounts of brightening or
| | 09:05 | darkening into any part of your image.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Reducing noise| 00:01 | All through this course I've been harping on
about oh, you don't want noise, you don't want noise!
| | 00:05 | Probably at this point the only thing
worst than hearing me continue to talk
| | 00:08 | about noise is facing bad noise in your images.
| | 00:11 | Fortunately, Photoshop and most other
image editors have noise reduction tools.
| | 00:16 | Now you shouldn't count on these as a
substitute for being intelligent about
| | 00:21 | your ISO choice, but if you do end up
with images with bad noise, you can
| | 00:24 | often greatly reduce the noise
through some careful application of noise
| | 00:29 | reduction software.
| | 00:30 | I've an image here. This is a JPEG file.
| | 00:32 | I know I've been telling you to shoot
RAW, but this is a JPEG file from an SLR in
| | 00:36 | 2000 or 2001 or so; storage was
expensive, so I couldn't shoot RAW.
| | 00:42 | Anywa,y this is a JPEG file, and
here's a case where before we adjust white
| | 00:46 | balance we need to do an exposure
adjustment because the image is so dark
| | 00:49 | I simply can't see.
| | 00:50 | So I'm going to go ahead and beef up my
Exposure slider here until I can begin
| | 00:56 | to even see the image, and now I can
a better idea of what my edits are.
| | 00:59 | This is the case where I'm doing the edits
out of my normal order simply because I have to.
| | 01:02 | I'm going to try and cool the image
down, but because this is a JPEG file, I
| | 01:07 | don't really have the white balance
latitude that I would normally have.
| | 01:11 | Already, you can probably
start to see this is noisy image.
| | 01:14 | This is one reason I picked a shot
from 2000; cameras were much noisier then.
| | 01:17 | You're going to see a fairly
exaggerated amount of noise, probably something
| | 01:21 | much greater than you would ever
find on a modern SLR, or even a modern
| | 01:25 | good-quality point-and-shoot camera.
| | 01:27 | I think you're also going to see it's
kind of amazing how much detail you can
| | 01:29 | pull out of a really dark shot.
| | 01:31 | So I don't want to take this white
balance too far this direction, because I'm
| | 01:35 | starting to get weird blue highlights and
lots of strange color, but he's still too red.
| | 01:39 | Very often in low-light shots you're
going to--even if you get white balance
| | 01:43 | corrected, you might still have people
that are just a little too saturated.
| | 01:46 | I often find with low-light images it's
good to just dial in some desaturation.
| | 01:50 | Already his skin tone is looking more natural.
| | 01:52 | So white balance is not the
only way to get better skin tone.
| | 01:55 | Careful use of saturation
can be another good way.
| | 01:58 | If you want to desaturate places in
your image but leave the skin tone how it
| | 02:02 | is, you've got the Vibrance control,
and lot of different image editing
| | 02:07 | applications have this now.
| | 02:08 | Aperture has something called Vibrancy.
| | 02:09 | Lightroom of course has the
same Vibrance slider here.
| | 02:12 | It's basically a skin-tone-
protected saturation control.
| | 02:16 | It will alter saturation in the image but for
the most part leave typical skin tones alone.
| | 02:21 | So he's looking better here.
| | 02:22 | I'm going to increase the contrast a little bit.
| | 02:24 | I find that a lot of times in an image that's
this low light--let me undo that edit real quick.
| | 02:30 | He's low light, which meant in this case
kind of flat light, it just, the image is
| | 02:33 | a little dull. It lacks a little pop.
| | 02:35 | Dialing up the Contrast is going to help.
| | 02:36 | It means I'm going to lose some
detail in the shadows, but I don't care.
| | 02:40 | It's really necessary to get an
image that's got a little more depth.
| | 02:43 | It also means he's turned a little
more red again, so I'm going to dial the
| | 02:46 | saturation back a little bit farther.
| | 02:49 | Now let's think about noise.
| | 02:51 | I'm going to zoom in here to 100% and
when I do, you can see, as I get closer,
| | 02:58 | it's really chunky in here.
| | 02:59 | There's a lot of noise.
| | 03:01 | The good news is it's not a
typically unfriendly noise;
| | 03:04 | it's mostly luminance noise, meaning
mostly changes in brightness, speckly
| | 03:09 | patterns all through here.
| | 03:10 | There's a very tiny bit of chrominance
noise, and I don't know if you'll able to
| | 03:14 | see this on your screen but I'm seeing
colored spots all over his forehead here,
| | 03:20 | a little bit on the bridge of
his nose. They are magenta.
| | 03:23 | Typically the chrominance noise that
you're going to get is going to be either
| | 03:26 | magenta or green and
they are large splotchy patterns.
| | 03:30 | In Camera Raw, I have a few
different noise-reduction options.
| | 03:33 | If I click here on the Detail tab, I
have Sharpening controls and I have
| | 03:37 | Noise Reduction controls.
| | 03:39 | Now we've not looked at
these Sharpening controls.
| | 03:41 | These are unsharp masking controls
just like you'll find in Photoshop, but
| | 03:45 | they're not quite as strong.
| | 03:47 | They're meant to just do a
little bit of sharpening.
| | 03:49 | They're very good tools.
| | 03:50 | They're definitely worth looking at,
as you explore more sharpening options.
| | 03:54 | Right below those are Noise
Reduction controls and these are not grouped
| | 03:57 | together by accident.
| | 03:59 | The way Noise Reduction works is it's
going to apply a lot of very controlled
| | 04:02 | blurs to our image to try to
hide the noise that's in there.
| | 04:06 | Well, blurring is going to
have an impact on sharpening.
| | 04:08 | So when we're doing noise
reduction, we're trying to balance
| | 04:12 | getting rid of noise without softening
our image too much, and so that's why
| | 04:15 | these tools are grouped together.
| | 04:17 | You can see I have three sliders that
say Luminance because they are targeted
| | 04:20 | at luminance noise, and then I have a couple
that are targeted at color or crominance noise.
| | 04:24 | I'm going to start with the Luminance slider.
| | 04:26 | It's currently at zero,
| | 04:27 | so I'm going to no noise reduction here.
I'm just going to dial it up and see what happens.
| | 04:31 | Maybe go up about a third of the way.
| | 04:33 | Wow, and right away I've got
far less noise in my image.
| | 04:38 | If I uncheck the Preview button,
you can see there's before.
| | 04:42 | I slid that Luminance slider and there's after.
| | 04:45 | So it's really taken a lot of
that noise out there.
| | 04:47 | Notice too that the Preview button,
when I unchecked it, it didn't go back to
| | 04:50 | the very original image.
| | 04:52 | It didn't undo all of my
tone and color corrections.
| | 04:54 | This is a great thing in more recent
versions of Camera Raw that it only
| | 04:57 | previews the current tab, which is really nice.
| | 05:00 | Now, I've got this Luminance Detail slider here.
| | 05:03 | This is just giving me a finer level of
control of how much detail is visible.
| | 05:08 | So this is kind of a way of balancing
sharpness with luminance noise reduction
| | 05:14 | here, just with these two sliders.
| | 05:15 | I can play with these, and this is
really just about personal preference.
| | 05:20 | Mostly I'm watching his eyes.
| | 05:22 | I want to be sure they stay sharp.
| | 05:23 | So I'm using his eyes as a
measure of when I have sharpness okay.
| | 05:26 | I'm using just his cheek right here to
see what I feel about noise reduction.
| | 05:30 | Then I've got Luminance Contrast, which
is a localized contrast adjustment that
| | 05:35 | can put a little bit of texture back in.
| | 05:39 | Texture, of course, is a function of contrast.
| | 05:41 | Where I have more contrast, I have more texture.
| | 05:43 | If I slide this back to 0--again
and you're looking at reduced version--
| | 05:48 | I'm seeing a very smooth patch of skin
here. As I increase Luminance Contrast,
| | 05:52 | it gets a little bit of natural looking
texture back in but doesn't get noisy again.
| | 05:57 | Move on down to the Color sliders here.
| | 05:58 | I'm looking at these magenta swatches up here.
| | 06:01 | I'm just going to drag this
to the right, and they're gone.
| | 06:04 | I'd like to say there's some finesse to
using that tool, but there's really not.
| | 06:08 | I slid it to the right.
| | 06:09 | That's about all there's to it.
| | 06:11 | I can dial up Color Detail or down on
this image. It's not going to make any
| | 06:16 | impact at all, because my color
noise was so minimal to begin with.
| | 06:19 | I haven't had a real loss of detail in here.
| | 06:22 | If you're working with an earlier
version of Photoshop--this Photoshop CS5--if
| | 06:25 | you're working with an earlier version
of Photoshop, you're not going to have
| | 06:29 | controls that work this well.
| | 06:30 | Adobe re-wrote the noise reduction
engine in Photoshop CS5, and I think you can
| | 06:35 | see that they've done a spectacular job.
| | 06:37 | Noise reduction in the
new Camera Raw is fantastic.
| | 06:39 | If you're using the latest version
of Lightroom, you've got the same
| | 06:42 | noise reduction tools.
| | 06:43 | If you're using an earlier version of
Photoshop, this might be a reason to upgrade,
| | 06:47 | the noise reduction is so good,
particularly if you have an older camera.
| | 06:51 | If you don't want to do that, if you
like the version of Photoshop you have, you
| | 06:54 | could consider going with a third-
party noise reduction plug-in of some kind.
| | 06:58 | Noise Ninja, Neat Image,
these are all very good tools.
| | 07:01 | They're just extra money.
| | 07:02 | I would really look into maybe I'll
take that money and pay for an upgrade.
| | 07:06 | Especially if you're thinking of
buying a new camera. If you're using an older
| | 07:09 | version of Photoshop,
| | 07:11 | you may have a Camera Raw that's
not going to work with the latest cameras.
| | 07:14 | So that's the basics of noise
reduction. As you can see, it's very simple.
| | 07:17 | If I want now to go in and work on the
sharpness of the image, I could do that
| | 07:21 | here or head on into Photoshop and
use my Smart Sharpen filter like I saw
| | 07:25 | earlier and maybe some masking to
constrain it to particular places.
| | 07:29 | Noise will vary greatly depending on
the camera you have and it will get much,
| | 07:32 | much worse of course as ISO goes
higher and your exposures get longer.
| | 07:36 | As you experiment with these controls,
I think you'll get a better feeling for
| | 07:40 | how they're going to work
with particular circumstances.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Sharpening| 00:01 | If you shoot RAW, then all of your
images, no matter what type of light they
| | 00:04 | were shot in, will need some
sharpening applied to them.
| | 00:07 | It's just a fact of the
way that image sensors work.
| | 00:10 | The image needs to be softened before
it hits the sensor, so there's a little
| | 00:14 | filter in front of the sensor that softens it.
| | 00:16 | That's a necessary step for the camera
to be able to properly interpret color.
| | 00:20 | That means you need to apply some
sharpening effects to get that little bit of
| | 00:23 | softness that's been added,
removed from your image.
| | 00:26 | Now, the bad news is that sharpening
isn't actually possible. And what I mean by
| | 00:30 | that is you cannot take an image
that's out of focus and make it in focus.
| | 00:34 | All we're doing when we use a
sharpening filter in the computer is creating
| | 00:38 | the illusion of sharpness.
| | 00:39 | Now, we may be treading on deep
philosophical ground here because really,
| | 00:43 | what's the difference between having an
illusion of sharpness and actually having sharpness?
| | 00:46 | If you do it right, there is no difference.
| | 00:48 | The danger about sharpening filters on
the computer is that you can take them
| | 00:52 | too far and end up degrading your image.
| | 00:54 | So, let's look at a simple
sharpening process here in Photoshop.
| | 00:58 | I'm going to just open one of these
images that I shot at the show the other night.
| | 01:01 | Right off the bat, I see that it
needs a white balance correction.
| | 01:04 | This should be pretty
easy. As we looked at earlier,
| | 01:06 | I'm going to take my White Balance
dropper and click on the white of her eye.
| | 01:10 | And that's pretty good. I'm going to do
some other quick exposure adjustments.
| | 01:14 | I'm going to brighten it up a little bit.
| | 01:16 | I think I liked it a little bit warmer,
so I'm going to put a little bit of
| | 01:18 | warmth back in with the
White Balance slider there.
| | 01:22 | And that's looking pretty good.
| | 01:23 | Now, most of the time I would say you
never zoom in to a 100% and worry too much
| | 01:28 | about what you find there.
With sharpness, it's different.
| | 01:30 | We actually do need to get in
close to the image and see what it's
| | 01:34 | like sharpness-wise.
| | 01:36 | This image was shot at ISO 1600.
| | 01:37 | I know that because, well,
because I was there, running the camera.
| | 01:42 | I also know that because
it says ISO 1600 right here.
| | 01:45 | That means that there's going to be
some noise in here and so there's a certain
| | 01:49 | level of detail that's going
to be obscured by that noise.
| | 01:52 | High-ISO images are always going to
be a little bit chunkier in terms of
| | 01:57 | individual detail, like her eyelashes
and things here. But overall I can see that
| | 02:01 | this image is soft. The edge of
her eyeball right here, that should be a good
| | 02:04 | hard line and it's not.
| | 02:05 | Now, in Camera Raw, I have this
Clarity slider here which will put a little
| | 02:11 | bit of sharpness back into the image, but it's
not really a full-on sharpness process here.
| | 02:17 | It's just meant to add a little bit
of extra micro-contrast in any edges
| | 02:23 | throughout the image, and it does help.
| | 02:24 | But this image is so soft,
it's really not getting me anywhere.
| | 02:27 | So, I'm going to put that back to 0 and move on.
| | 02:30 | I'm going to leave Camera Raw
now and go on into Photoshop.
| | 02:33 | So, I'm hitting the Open Image button.
And Camera RAW will process the image,
| | 02:39 | convert it into a full-color final
result here, and let's take a look at this.
| | 02:44 | Now, before we get to the sharpening,
I want to make one other quick change, and
| | 02:47 | this maybe a feature that you're
not familiar with. This is in CS5.
| | 02:51 | It's a great tool for recomposing your shot.
| | 02:54 | I wish I had asked them to get
a little bit closer together.
| | 02:57 | The space in here just right in the
center of the frame is bugging me.
| | 03:00 | So, I'm going to Select All by hitting
Command+A--that would be Ctrl+A on Windows--
| | 03:05 | and go up here to the Edit menu
and choose Content-Aware Scale.
| | 03:09 | This is going to let me squish the
image inwards, but it's not going to do a
| | 03:12 | uniform linear squish, it's going to
try and figure out where the content is in
| | 03:17 | the image and not modify
those bits of the picture.
| | 03:20 | There are handles on all
sides of my images right now.
| | 03:23 | I'm just going to grab this handle and
drag this way, and as I do, you see that
| | 03:29 | it is scaling the image so that she
is moving but not getting distorted.
| | 03:33 | It's taken all of the
unnecessary pixels out of the middle here.
| | 03:37 | There might be a tiny bit of distortion on her.
| | 03:39 | If there is, I can't see it,
so I'm not going to worry about it.
| | 03:42 | I like that better.
I think this is a cleaner composition this way.
| | 03:45 | So, I'm going to hit the
Return key to take that.
| | 03:47 | Now, when it does this scaling,
it leaves the canvas size at its original size,
| | 03:52 | and because my background color was set to
black, it's filled that excess canvas with black.
| | 03:57 | I don't need that.
Fortunately, I still have my selection here.
| | 04:00 | So, I can go up to the Image menu and
choose Crop, and that crops my image down
| | 04:04 | to just that selection.
| | 04:05 | So, I'm going to deselect and now
I'm ready to think about sharpening.
| | 04:09 | I'm going to go into 100% here, which
I can do by hitting Command+1 or Ctrl+1
| | 04:13 | if you're on Windows. And again, I can see
that I really need some sharpening in here.
| | 04:18 | As it came out of Camera RAW,
it didn't sharpen up anyway.
| | 04:22 | There are a lot of
sharpening filters in Photoshop.
| | 04:24 | If I go here to the Filter menu and
down to Sharpen, I see I have Sharpen and
| | 04:28 | Sharp Edges and Sharpen More.
| | 04:30 | And I have two at the bottom:
Unsharp Mask and Smart Sharpen.
| | 04:33 | These are actually variations
on the same sharpening algorithm.
| | 04:36 | It used to be that Unsharp Mask was
the sharpening mechanism of choice, and
| | 04:41 | that may sound a little
counterintuitive that I would sharpen my image by
| | 04:45 | choosing something called Unsharp, but Unsharp
masking is actually a term from the darkroom days.
| | 04:51 | It was a technique of creating an
unsharp copy of your negative and using it to
| | 04:55 | build a mask that you could use to create
this effect that we're going to create digitally.
| | 04:58 | I'm going to choose Smart Sharpen.
| | 05:01 | Note, there is no dumb sharpen,
so you don't have to get confused there.
| | 05:05 | And that brings up this dialog box.
| | 05:06 | Now, what sharpening filters do, for
the most part, is they look for an edge in
| | 05:11 | your image, and edges are simply
areas of sudden contrast change.
| | 05:17 | Every edge in an image has a
dark side and a light side.
| | 05:20 | For example let's find a good representative
edge here, the edge of her nose right here.
| | 05:27 | It has this dark side here on the left
and a lighter side here on the right.
| | 05:30 | I can increase the acutance of that edge.
| | 05:34 | I can make that edge more acute
| | 05:35 | if I darken the pixels along the dark
side and lighten the pixels along the
| | 05:39 | light side. What this does is it
creates a little halo around the edge, and that
| | 05:44 | makes it appear more acute,
just simply makes it more visible.
| | 05:47 | That's what this plug-in is already doing.
| | 05:50 | If you look here in this Preview area
when I click and hold the mouse button
| | 05:53 | like this, I can see the original image;
| | 05:56 | when I let go, I see the sharpened image.
| | 05:59 | That's before, after, and it's
definitely sharpening up some.
| | 06:03 | Now, the danger of sharpening on a
high-ISO image--the type of image you're
| | 06:07 | going to be shooting in low light--is
you'll be sharpening the noise also.
| | 06:10 | That's one of the sharpening
dangers that we're going to look at.
| | 06:13 | I have two sliders here:
| | 06:15 | Amount, which is simply how much
brightening and darkening it's doing on the
| | 06:20 | side of an edge, and Radius, which is
how wide that little halo it's painting is.
| | 06:25 | So, if you really want to see what
sharpening does, you can get a very good idea
| | 06:29 | by just throwing these
settings to their extremes.
| | 06:32 | I'm going to say, add a whole lot of light
and dark and make it really, really wide.
| | 06:39 | Now, you could see that as I'm making
these changes, it's also applying them
| | 06:43 | to my original image.
| | 06:44 | Now, you can see what I'm talking about.
| | 06:46 | We're not actually sharpening the image.
We're creating this optical illusion.
| | 06:49 | If I don't do it very carefully I
end up with an image that looks like this.
| | 06:52 | It looks kind of a color Xerox.
| | 06:54 | Let me back off on this some so we
can see a little more of what it's doing.
| | 06:59 | Something's that's not quite so extreme.
| | 07:03 | I'm going to put it about here, and now
you can start to see, on this edge right
| | 07:07 | here below her eyes, watch
this white area right here.
| | 07:11 | I'm going to pull this up here.
| | 07:13 | This white area right here, as I drag the
Radius slider, it's getting less pronounced.
| | 07:18 | The dark area right here along
this edge is getting less pronounced.
| | 07:21 | As I increase it, you can see that that
bit of contrast is simply increasing, and
| | 07:25 | that what's making the image appear more sharp.
| | 07:28 | So, let's put these back to where they were.
| | 07:30 | They were around 1 and an Amount of 100%.
| | 07:34 | On an image with noise problems like
this, you're typically going to need an
| | 07:38 | amount that's wider than 100%.
| | 07:40 | These are the default
settings for Smart Sharpen.
| | 07:42 | So, I'm going to goose that up a
little bit higher and I'm going to make the
| | 07:46 | Radius a little bit bigger.
| | 07:48 | These are fairly aggressive settings and
again, that's just because of the noise.
| | 07:51 | But, let's take a look now at before and after.
| | 07:56 | It's not a huge change, but it's like
just this veil has been lifted off of it,
| | 08:00 | and that's really going to show up in print.
| | 08:02 | What I don't want to do is push this
so far that I can start to see those
| | 08:05 | halos, that I start making my image
appear more visibly noisy, either because
| | 08:09 | I'm actually exaggerating the noise in the
image or I'm creating a lots of new artifacts.
| | 08:13 | Finally, there's been More Accurate button.
| | 08:16 | If I click that, the sharpening
becomes actually more accurate. And it's
| | 08:21 | just doing a more complex algorithm, and it's
actually making it a little more aggressive.
| | 08:25 | It's changing the accuracy of this
preview so that I can really see what it's
| | 08:29 | going to look like when I come out.
| | 08:31 | Finally, I've got this Remove pop-up menu here.
| | 08:33 | We're going to talk
about that in the next movie.
| | 08:34 | So, I'm feeling pretty good about this.
| | 08:37 | Again, I'm not worried too much about
what it looks like here, because this is
| | 08:41 | a down-sampled image.
| | 08:43 | I will want to print the image or do
whatever my final output is going to be and
| | 08:46 | judge my sharpness there.
| | 08:47 | Sharpening always happens after sizing,
so you will of course have wanted to
| | 08:52 | resize this image to your final
output size before you do your sharpening.
| | 08:56 | So, when you're working with low light, you're
typically going to be working at higher ISOs.
| | 09:00 | So, your sharpening settings are
probably going to be a little bit different
| | 09:02 | than what you're used to if you're already
accustomed to sharpening images of lower ISOs.
| | 09:07 | They are going to need to be a little
more aggressive and you are going to need
| | 09:09 | to keep an eye on the noise and make
sure that you don't exaggerate it too much.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Correcting depth-of-field issues| 00:00 | By now you should be comfortable with a
balancing act that is low-light photography.
| | 00:05 | Of course, in any type of
photography you are always balancing, shutter
| | 00:08 | speed, aperture, ISO, depth of field,
motion stopping, but in low-light
| | 00:11 | shooting you are really pushing the
bounds of those things, and sometimes
| | 00:15 | it's hard to keep it all in order.
| | 00:16 | I ran into a problem the other
night, at the theatersports show.
| | 00:19 | If you look at this image here, you'll
see that I have a depth-of-field problem.
| | 00:25 | Really soft focus back here but not here.
| | 00:28 | Now a lot of times you might be
reviewing an image and find a focus
| | 00:32 | problem and think oh no, my auto
focus on my camera isn't working.
| | 00:36 | Here it is, to my eye, plainly a depth-of-
field problem because I do have good focus.
| | 00:40 | It's just not very deep.
| | 00:42 | I can confirm that though by
going and checking out my metadata.
| | 00:45 | I am at f/8.0, which seems like it
should be pretty deep, but still, I have got
| | 00:50 | this softness back here.
| | 00:51 | I don't think he was moving, so whatever
the case, I have got a problem that this
| | 00:56 | image may not be usable because
I don't like the shallow focus.
| | 00:59 | However, I have sharpening tools.
| | 01:01 | Now this is an awful lot of
blurring we have got here.
| | 01:03 | We will have to see how much we can do.
| | 01:06 | I can't really bring him into the same
level of sharpness that I can bring him.
| | 01:11 | But sharpness is a weird thing.
| | 01:12 | It's a really subjective thing,
particularly when it comes to portraits, where we
| | 01:16 | mostly take the cues of our sharpness from
eyes and little bits of hair here and there.
| | 01:21 | So I am going to do some very
aggressive sharpening, but I am going to do it in
| | 01:24 | a very selective manner, to try and
create the illusion that maybe he is not as
| | 01:28 | soft as he seems to be.
| | 01:30 | So let's open this image in Camera Raw.
I was shooting row so, as always, because
| | 01:34 | it's low light, I need a
white balance correction.
| | 01:36 | I am going grab my eyedropper, get
over here into the whites of his eyes, and
| | 01:41 | that's working pretty well.
| | 01:42 | With color corrected, I am going to
go in and work my exposure some. I want
| | 01:45 | the Exposure brighter.
| | 01:47 | I am mostly just following the histogram here.
| | 01:50 | I will warm it up a tiny, little bit.
| | 01:53 | I could save all of these as a
preset if I want, or copy the white balance
| | 01:57 | of course from image to image for these
images that were all shot in the same place.
| | 02:00 | That's looking pretty good. I am not going to do any
sharpening or anything in here.
| | 02:03 | I am going to head on into Photoshop,
because I want to do a selective sharpening,
| | 02:07 | which is going to require some masking,
something that I cannot do in Camera Raw.
| | 02:12 | So, I am going to start here by
duplicating my background layer.
| | 02:16 | This is the layer that contains the image data.
| | 02:19 | And I am going to duplicate it
because sharpening is always a destructive
| | 02:22 | edit. It actually mangles my original
pictures and if I screw up, I want a way
| | 02:27 | of backing out of my process. And also
sharpening is a difficult thing to judge on screen.
| | 02:32 | I might want to be able to do a print
to judge whether my sharpness is exactly
| | 02:36 | right, so I may want to take the sharpening
out and put in different sharpening later.
| | 02:39 | So I am going to duplicate my
background layer by dragging this layer down here
| | 02:43 | to the New Layer button.
| | 02:44 | So now I have two identical layers here.
| | 02:48 | If I turn off the visibility of this one,
you see that the image doesn't change
| | 02:51 | at all, because it's simply revealing
the identical layer that's below it.
| | 02:54 | Now I am going to sharpen this layer.
| | 02:56 | There will need to be two
sharpening passes made to this image.
| | 03:00 | There needs to be an overall
sharpening pass, because all images need to be
| | 03:03 | sharpened, and then my more aggressive
sharpening paths that needs to be done to him.
| | 03:06 | Right now we are just going
to do that more aggressive one.
| | 03:09 | So I am going to start by doing what I
would always do. I'm going to the Filter
| | 03:11 | menu, down to Sharpen, and choosing
Smart Sharpen. And I really am going to be
| | 03:18 | doing everything based on my preview
here just, like I always would, but I don't
| | 03:21 | care about looking at him.
| | 03:24 | In fact, he is going to end up
tremendously oversharpened in this process.
| | 03:27 | Instead, I am going to come over here and
I am going to look at his right eye. In
| | 03:32 | a portrait it's always the eyes
that matter; if the eyes are sharp,
| | 03:35 | it will often hide softness
in other parts of the image.
| | 03:37 | That's what we're hoping for from this image.
| | 03:40 | So I am going to do a really
aggressive sharpening here. Because he is full-on
| | 03:45 | out of focus, he is not just soft,
| | 03:47 | I am going to dial these up pretty high.
| | 03:50 | I am also going to change Remove from
Gaussian Blur to Lens Blur, and that's
| | 03:55 | going to invoke a different sharpening
algorithm that might help me out a little more here.
| | 03:59 | I am sharpening up the noise a lot here, but
I am not going to worry about that too much.
| | 04:03 | I am also not going to worry about
what's happening to this skin tone, because I
| | 04:08 | am going to create a mask
that's going to hide that.
| | 04:12 | So I am not really sure
exactly where I want these.
| | 04:14 | Yet again I might do some trial and error.
| | 04:16 | I think I am going to try taking the
Amount down so that I am not getting such
| | 04:21 | an aggressive brightening and darkening;
instead, I am going to crank the Radius
| | 04:24 | up so that it creates larger halos.
| | 04:27 | I am liking this better. It's looking
more just like a noisy photo instead of
| | 04:31 | something with really exaggerated grain.
| | 04:34 | Taking a look over here, I see that
his eyes definitely look sharper here.
| | 04:38 | I am going to turn off the preview so
you can see before. Just watch this area
| | 04:42 | here as I check this again. After,
sharpened up quite nicely. A little bit more.
| | 04:49 | Now he's getting a little too sharp.
| | 04:51 | I am going to hit OK now and let
the sharpening filter go to work.
| | 04:55 | Now this sharpening is too aggressive
for this man's skin tone, and I don't like
| | 05:00 | what it's doing to some other places in
the image, but that's okay. I am going to
| | 05:03 | create a mask that's going to constrain
this sharpening to just his eyes and a
| | 05:07 | couple other locations.
| | 05:08 | Sharpening can often be murder on skin tones.
| | 05:11 | It can exaggerate every pore,
every little blemish, every wrinkle.
| | 05:14 | So you need to be very careful when
you are sharpening people's faces, because
| | 05:17 | it's very easy to quickly
make them less attractive.
| | 05:20 | So with a mask, I can keep the
sharpening effect off of the flat parts of their
| | 05:25 | skin, the parts that actually weren't
looking too bad, and get it into the areas
| | 05:29 | of fine detail, like eyes and
eyebrows and things like that.
| | 05:33 | I mentioned before that this image
needs two different sharpening passes:
| | 05:37 | one to take care--a very aggressive one
to take care of how soft he is, and then
| | 05:41 | a normal sharpening pass to just put
back in the normal amount of sharpening
| | 05:45 | that we need because this is a raw image.
| | 05:47 | I think I can do both of those with
this single sharpening layer here.
| | 05:50 | I am going to start my next bit here by
actually labeling this layer. I am going
| | 05:55 | to say this is Sharpening
and I will say Sharpened.
| | 05:59 | So years later, when I come back to
this image I will know what this seemingly
| | 06:02 | duplicate layer is for.
| | 06:03 | I am going to turn this layer off so
that you can see: there is the original
| | 06:08 | blurry one that's sitting below
and there is the sharpened one.
| | 06:11 | Now I am going to go up to my
Layer menu and say Layer Mask > Hide All.
| | 06:17 | And what that does is it attaches a mask to
this layer that's completely filled with black.
| | 06:21 | If you are not comfortable with masking,
or familiar with masking, it's actually
| | 06:25 | pretty easy once you work with it a little bit.
| | 06:27 | Think of this mask like a stencil.
| | 06:30 | Think of this as a can of spray paint
that paints an exact copy of this image.
| | 06:36 | I'm going to spray that paint
through this stencil onto my lower image.
| | 06:40 | Of course, black parts in a stencil
are opaque, if you were to hold it up
| | 06:43 | to light and look at it.
| | 06:44 | White parts would be transparent or see-through.
| | 06:46 | So what I want to do is just punch a
hole in this stencil, in this mask here, and
| | 06:49 | I can do that with the paintbrush.
| | 06:51 | I am going to take the paintbrush and
now I am going to select some white paint
| | 06:54 | and now I am just going to
start painting into the mask.
| | 06:58 | Now I am painting into the mask, not
the image, and you can see, I have punched
| | 07:01 | a little hole there.
| | 07:03 | If this had been selected--and you can
tell it's selected because it has this
| | 07:06 | little box around it--now I am
painting actual white paint into the image.
| | 07:12 | So I'll undo that and go back to my
mask here, and just paint wherever I want
| | 07:19 | the image to be sharp.
| | 07:21 | So I am going to do his eyes.
I think I am going to hit his mouth, just a
| | 07:25 | little bit around here.
| | 07:27 | Basically, I am trying to get things
that are in the same plane as his eyes
| | 07:30 | because those things should all be
sharp. And just a few cues towards sharpening
| | 07:34 | will give us an overall idea that the
image is sharp, so maybe a little bit in
| | 07:40 | there and I'll just do his nose a little bit.
| | 07:42 | So I haven't brutalized his skin tones
over here with too much sharpening, but I
| | 07:46 | have punched up his eyes.
| | 07:47 | So let's do a before and after.
| | 07:48 | That's with the sharpen layer hidden,
that's with it on. He looks sharper to me,
| | 07:53 | even though a bunch of his face is still blurry.
| | 07:56 | Now I mentioned before that the rest
of this image needs some sharpening too.
| | 08:00 | I can do that with this same Sharpening layer.
| | 08:02 | If black completely hides this layer
and white completely reveals it, then it
| | 08:08 | stands to reason that a shade of gray
would put in a little bit of this layer
| | 08:12 | and sure enough, that's what it does.
| | 08:14 | I am going to just dial up a 50% gray
or so, and now I am painting in basically
| | 08:21 | half the sharpening effect.
| | 08:23 | So because he doesn't need as much
sharpening, I'm okay just dialing in some of
| | 08:27 | it. So I am just going to paint a little
bit in here. Hair, it's almost always a
| | 08:32 | sharpness cue, but I am going to stay
away from a lot of his skin tones, just so
| | 08:37 | that they don't end up looking too crunchy.
| | 08:43 | And so again, I've managed to do all
the sharpening I need just with that one
| | 08:47 | layer and some masking.
| | 08:48 | So here we go. That's before, that's after.
| | 08:53 | So, shallow depth of field, to a degree,
motion blur--if it's not motion blur that's
| | 08:58 | too extreme--those are two problems
that you are going to encounter in
| | 09:01 | low-light shooting. To a degree you
can correct those with an aggressive
| | 09:05 | sharpening plug-in.
| | 09:06 | However, an aggressive sharpening plug-
in is going to make a lot of other things
| | 09:09 | in your image look bad.
| | 09:10 | So I really recommend trying a selective
sharpening technique by using a mask on
| | 09:15 | a duplicate of your image, a
duplicate layer that has been sharpened.
| | 09:18 | If you get a little practice with this,
it starts making sense and the masking
| | 09:21 | stuff becomes much clearer.
| | 09:22 | You can get to where you can easily
read a mask and understand oh, this is
| | 09:25 | revealed and this isn't, and this is
partially revealed. So give it a try.
| | 09:28 | It should become very intuitive very quickly.
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| Correcting night skies| 00:01 | If you're shooting a night sky and you
want star trails, you are always going to
| | 00:04 | have a problem with the background of
the sky, the ambient section of the sky,
| | 00:07 | brightening up a lot.
| | 00:09 | Here are two images that I shot in Eureka
Valley, part of Death Valley National Park.
| | 00:14 | Here's what I did without star trails, and
then I did a 30-minute exposure with star trails.
| | 00:20 | This one in the left here is about a
one-minute-long exposure. And you can see
| | 00:24 | that in addition to having a long
enough exposure to capture wonderful smeary
| | 00:28 | stars, it also really
brightened up the background of the sky.
| | 00:31 | And so it makes the star trails less
impressive. They are kind of washed out by
| | 00:35 | the ambient light in the sky, and a lot
of that light is coming from the fact
| | 00:39 | that the sun had set over here.
You can see it right here.
| | 00:42 | Just in case you're wondering, these
streaks through this part of the image are
| | 00:45 | airplanes that were flying by at the time.
| | 00:47 | And notice here you can see the Milky Way.
| | 00:49 | The Milky Way even shows up over here as
this bright streak of light right here.
| | 00:53 | There is not going to be anyway of
getting the rid of that. Actually, I kind
| | 00:55 | of like that it's there.
| | 00:57 | This is a real easy edit to make;
| | 00:58 | you just need Levels adjustment layer.
The tricky bit is getting it to the blend
| | 01:01 | properly with the foreground.
| | 01:03 | The foreground, by the way, is, I had a
campfire burning and so that was casting a
| | 01:06 | lot of light in the
foreground. That's why it's all red.
| | 01:08 | I'm going to make a new levels
adjustment layer, and then I'm going to just
| | 01:13 | crank the black point up to really
try and beef up the contrast in the sky.
| | 01:19 | As long as I am doing that, I might as well
move the white point also. But I've got to
| | 01:23 | be more careful with that because that's
actually brightening the ambient temperature.
| | 01:26 | I'm going to try the midpoint to get some
of those midtones. No, I don't like that.
| | 01:29 | In fact, I'm going to take the
midpoint adjustment the other direction.
| | 01:33 | Now what I'm kind of riding here is
I'm watching these stars in here, I don't
| | 01:37 | want to lose too many stars, so this
is a little bit tricky. I want the sky
| | 01:44 | darker, but I don't want to take out some
all the actual information that I want there.
| | 01:50 | Something else I don't like about this
image is I don't like the red tinge that
| | 01:53 | it's getting. I'd like to take that out.
| | 01:55 | But first let's do with the fact that
I'm now darkened the foreground so much that
| | 01:59 | it's unintelligible.
| | 02:01 | I've got my mask over here.
| | 02:03 | Right now it's completely white
which means the entire image is getting
| | 02:06 | the levels adjustment.
| | 02:07 | I would like only the upper
half to get that adjustment.
| | 02:10 | Your first thought might be well, Oh no
that means I've got to get a paintbrush
| | 02:14 | and paint around every one of these
tiny little details here on the horizon.
| | 02:17 | You don't have to do that;
| | 02:18 | you can really fake this very
effectively by using the Gradient tool.
| | 02:23 | This is the Gradient tool right here.
| | 02:24 | If you're not seeing it, it may be because
it's hidden underneath the Paint Bucket tool.
| | 02:28 | This is what's here by default.
| | 02:30 | If I just click and hold on the paint
bucket, it pops on into this little menu
| | 02:34 | and I can choose the Gradient tool.
| | 02:36 | I want to be sure I have a gradient
set from white to black, and I want to be
| | 02:39 | sure it's a linear gradient rather than a
radial gradient or one of the other options.
| | 02:43 | I've got my foreground color set to
white, my background color set to black.
| | 02:48 | Now I'm going to come over here and I'm
going to start where I want the gradient
| | 02:52 | to begin, and I'm simply going to drag
down to where I want the gradient to end,
| | 02:56 | and when I let go, it does this.
| | 02:58 | Now if you're not clear on what's
happened here, take a look at my mask.
| | 03:02 | I've got white up above, so my levels
adjustment, which is darkening the image, is
| | 03:07 | being applied at full strength, all
through here all the way down to about here,
| | 03:12 | where it starts ramping off to no
adjustment at all. So that's creating a smooth
| | 03:16 | transition from completely
adjusted to not adjusted at all.
| | 03:19 | And fortunately, it's the nature of
the horizon that it is a gradient.
| | 03:23 | So, I'm just kind of hiding that
transition in what should be a natural
| | 03:27 | transition in the sky anyway.
| | 03:29 | That said, I think I missed.
| | 03:30 | I think there's a little too much
brightening right in here, so I can just
| | 03:34 | redefine the gradient right now.
| | 03:36 | I don't have to erase anything.
| | 03:37 | I'm going to start at the top of this
mountain here and drag more down into here.
| | 03:43 | I'm just going to a little bit lower
than I was before. That's going to cast a
| | 03:46 | little more of the image into darkness.
| | 03:48 | The great thing about this is these
mountains were already in silhouette, so
| | 03:51 | I'm hiding the transition in
an area that was already black.
| | 03:54 | So I think that's looking pretty good.
| | 03:55 | I've got my brightness where I want.
Let me give you a before and after. That's
| | 03:57 | before, that's after.
More dramatic stars this way.
| | 04:02 | But let's see what we can
do about this reddishness.
| | 04:05 | I'm going to up here to my Levels
palette and create a Hue/Saturation layer, and
| | 04:10 | I'm going to target these red tones.
| | 04:12 | They are more orange tones, but I'm
going to hit Reds here and then grab this
| | 04:17 | eyedropper and click on maybe the
brightest red in here that I can find.
| | 04:21 | Now I can de-saturate this area
and just take some of the color out.
| | 04:26 | If I wanted, I could go a little
bit further and even shift to the hue.
| | 04:30 | If I look over here, I see
that the sky is pretty blue.
| | 04:32 | If I wanted, I could try shifting more
towards blue. It's going to be a really
| | 04:37 | difficult edit to pull off and I
actually like this warm color that's in here.
| | 04:41 | I'm going to just put that right in there.
| | 04:44 | Problem is I have now de-
saturated my foreground too much.
| | 04:47 | I can fix that again with pretty much
the same gradient that I used before. I'm
| | 04:50 | going to grab my Gradient tool, drag
down into here, and that's brightened this
| | 04:58 | back up--or not brightened it
back up; that's re-saturated it.
| | 05:00 | And in fact, now that I see it re-
saturated, I realize that actually it's a
| | 05:04 | little too saturated.
| | 05:05 | I would like this to not be quite so red.
| | 05:08 | So if I look at my mask, I see I've got
white at the top with a smooth gradient
| | 05:11 | going into the black. So full
desaturation here and then starting about here
| | 05:16 | and less and less and less, until here
where there's no desaturation at all, and
| | 05:19 | so I'm getting the full original orange.
| | 05:21 | I can now grab a paintbrush and a shade
of gray--I'm going to pick somewhere in
| | 05:26 | the middle here--and if I brush in here, I'm
now painting over the black area with gray.
| | 05:34 | In other words, I'm adding a little bit
of that desaturation that I dialed in.
| | 05:38 | So here I am mixing painting
techniques within a single mask to build up this
| | 05:43 | more complex mask that's white on the
top, a gradient through the middle, and
| | 05:48 | then just these areas here where I'm
adding a little bit of desaturation.
| | 05:53 | And you can tell that my mask is a
little bit sloppy. It doesn't matter. These
| | 05:55 | areas around here, they're mostly
shadow. They're mostly black, so I can't see
| | 05:59 | how saturated they are.
| | 06:00 | So, that works pretty well.
| | 06:01 | Let me give you a full before and after here.
| | 06:03 | I'm going to turn off both adjustment layers.
| | 06:05 | You can see this is my original
image and now with both the Levels and
| | 06:09 | Hue/Saturation layer, I get this,
so I think that looks a lot better.
| | 06:12 | These are pretty typical techniques
you'll need to do on probably any of your
| | 06:16 | long*exposure sky shots.
| | 06:18 | You may not have the color
shift here that I've got.
| | 06:21 | You may have a sky that after you
do your levels adjustment comes out
| | 06:24 | looking way too blue.
| | 06:26 | Let's do the same thing I did with my
Hue/Saturation adjustment layer here, but
| | 06:30 | instead of targeting reds, target
blues, and you can pull out some of that
| | 06:33 | super-saturated blue that may get in
there and get back to a more natural-
| | 06:37 | looking sky.
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ConclusionGoodbye| 00:01 | We started this course by reviewing
those three exposure fundamentals: shutter
| | 00:04 | speed, aperture, and ISO, and here at
the end of it, I hope you've seen that
| | 00:08 | low-light shooting makes you dig
really deep into your exposure theory and in
| | 00:12 | that regard, it's a great exercise
for understanding those fundamental
| | 00:16 | photographic mechanics.
| | 00:17 | But more than that, I hope as you've
gone out and done a little bit of this low-
| | 00:21 | light stuff, that you come to see that
the real great thing about low light and
| | 00:25 | night shooting is that it opens your
eyes in a way that daylight shooting
| | 00:29 | simply doesn't. Light and shadow
is so different at nighttime.
| | 00:32 | It brings up a whole new palette of
photographic options to work with.
| | 00:36 | If you haven't been out shooting
already, if you mostly just been following
| | 00:39 | along, now's the time to get going.
| | 00:41 | If the sun still up, start polishing
your camera; if it's already down then
| | 00:45 | start putting on your coat, or whatever
else is appropriate for whatever kind of
| | 00:48 | weather you're in right now.
| | 00:50 | Get out there and do some shooting in low light.
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