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Saturday, February 19, 2011

Filed under: Market Served •Stock •Travel •Products •Lighting •Photoshop •

Blending White Balance

Tom Bol | 02/19

Blend white balance for the right effect in night shots.

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Star trails and night photography used to be one of my favorite activities with film shooting.  I’d go out on a moonless night and set up a star trail image, often times leaving the shutter open for more than an hour.  Then I entered the digital age and quickly realized star trails didn’t work.  A hour long exposure on my early digital camera looked like a speckled piece of sandpaper, noise permeated the shot. But then digital cameras got better.  And better.  Now I shoot a Nikon D3s with a larger sensor, and I get results similar to shooting film. 

A few things are important to get the most out of a long exposure image.  First, if your camera has long exposure noise reduction, turn it on.  This will greatly improve the final results in your image.  With long exposure noise reduction turned on your camera will process the shot as long as the initial exposure.  So if you shoot a one hour shot, the camera will process the image for an hour, resulting in two hour capture/processing time.  Remember to make sure you have fresh batteries. 

Another trick I often do with my night time shots is light paint a part of the foreground with the stars in the background.  With the image here I used a small penlight to illuminate the rock.  In Photoshop I processed the raw file once with a white balance of 3200 Kelvin to make the sky very blue, and processed another image at 5500 Kelvin to make the rock warm orange.  I then placed the cool blue sky shot on top of the warm rock image, added a mask, and brushed in the warm rock from the bottom layer to reveal the rock in the cool blue sky.  Instead of star trails I shot a fast high ISO image.  20 second exposure at F4, ISO 3200 shot on a Nikon D3s.

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Use gels on your flash for special effects.

Tom Bol | 05/11- 05:35 AM

Adding gels to your flash and changing white balance creates unique images.

I like to follow this principle.  “The more skills you have, the better your chances for success.”  I used to use this principle as a climbing instructor when teaching students rope systems.  Inevitably on some climb something wouldn’t go right, maybe a simple thing like getting a rope stuck.  The more rescue and climbing systems you knew, the better your chances of having a solution to fix the problem.
The same is true for photographers.  Every photographer has a story about a ‘photo shoot gone bad.’  Strobes don’t fire, talent doesn’t show up, permits aren’t in order.  What separates one photographer from another is how they deal with these situations.  Clients like photographers who have solutions, not problems.  Knowing more technical skills behind the camera also helps.  And one of my favorite things to do is add gels to flash to spice things up.

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Creative Use of High Speed Sync

Tom Bol | 04/29- 10:11 AM

Use high speed sync to add mood to your shot.

When most people think of high speed sync, they think fast shutter speeds and freezing the action.  True, shooting at 1/8000 with flash is going to freeze the action no matter what the main light source is illuminating the subject.  But what about other uses of high speed sync and flash.  Until the release of the Pocket Wizard Flex system and Hypersync (see my last post), I was often frustrated shooting in bright sun.  I needed an aperture of F16 to get the right exposure at 1/200, my fastest sync speed using my Elinchrom Rangers.  What if I wanted to use a wide open aperture like F2.8 to get soft focus and blur out the background?  The answer is use high speed sync for selective focus shots in bright, sunny conditions.  Maybe high speed sync should be called ‘soft focus sync.’

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