Digital Camera Master

Sometimes it’s easier to take your own picture than to hand the camera to someone else especially when you’re practicing with your camera. Everything you learned a few pages ago about taking headshots applies to pictures you take of yourself. Helpful camera features for self-portraits include the following:

POWER USERS’ CLINIC - Built-In Flash vs. External Flash
More expensive digital cameras offer serious photographers a wonderful feature: a place to plug in an external flash attachment. An external flash moves the light source away from the lens, which reduces red eye, especially if the flash is on its own separate bracket rather than a hot shoe right on the camera. The external flash makes your camera’s battery last longer, too, because it has its own batteries. You’ll be grateful for that during long events like weddings.

The most versatile way to attach an external flash is with a standard hot shoe right on top of the camera, as shown in Figure below. Some cameras just aren’t big enough to accommodate a hot shoe. To circumvent this problem, some camera makers have engineered a system that uses a tiny socket on the camera that connects to the flash via a proprietary cord and bracket.

This system isn’t the height of versatility, but it does allow you the flexibility of an external flash on a very compact camera. Finally, a detached flash attachment gives you more flexibility, because you can use it to bounce light off the wall or ceiling to provide fill lighting for certain shots.

A good external flash with a dedicated cord costs at least $200, and, of course, only the fancier digital cameras can accommodate them. But as you become more serious with your photographic pastime, you’ll find that external flashes help you capture shots that on-camera flashes just can’t get.

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Taking pictures outside should be a no-brainer, right? There’s plenty of natural light from the sun, so why do so many outdoor photos come out underexposed and disappointing, like the top image in Figure below? Your digital camera’s built-in flash is convenient, but it isn’t terribly smart. Outdoor portraits are a perfect example. If you leave the flash on automatic when you shoot outdoors, you can guess what happens: The camera decides that there’s plenty of light and doesn’t trip the flash. Sure, the camera’s correct in concluding that there’s enough light in the entire frame. But it can’t tell when your subject is sitting in a shadow.

Everybody with a little picture taking experience knows how ornery and feeble an automatic flash is, indoors or out. If you’re too close to the subject, it overflashes, turning your best friend into a nuked-out ghost. If you’re farther than about eight feet away, the flash is too weak to do anything useful at all. Believe it or not, the camera’s automatic mode is wrong about half the time. No matter what kind of camera you have, you’ll take your best pictures when you decide to use the flash, not when the camera decides.

1. Forcing the flash to fire
The solution to the situation in Figure below is to force the flash on a very common trick. If you’re close enough to the subject, then the flash provides fill light to balance the subject’s exposure with that of the surrounding background, as you can see in the bottom photo. (If you’re using your on-camera flash, stand within about eight feet of the subject so you can get enough flash for a proper exposure.) The fill-in flash can dramatically improve outdoor portraits. It eliminates the silhouette effect when your subject is standing in front of a bright background and frontal light is very flattering. It softens smile lines and wrinkles, and it puts a nice twinkle in the subject’s eyes.

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The reason photographic lighting is such a challenge is that you have two different systems operating at once: your eyes and your camera. Your pupils are super-advanced apertures that constantly adjust to ambient light. Even in extreme conditions, such as when you go from a completely dark theater to the bright lobby, it takes only seconds for your optical system to adjust.

Furthermore, you can look at a scene that contains both deep shadows and super-bright highlights and see detail in both areas simultaneously. Your eyes, optical nerves, and brain adjust constantly to interpret the ever-changing landscape around you. Unfortunately, your camera can’t do the same.

While your eyes can pick up the entire tonal range of a scene (the shades from brightest white to darkest black), a camera can pick up detail in only a slice of it. For example, if you’re shooting a bright sky filled with clouds and trees casting deep shadows on meadow grass, you have a decision to make.

Which parts of this scene are most important to you, the bright sky, the trees, or the deep shadows? On a good day, your camera records detail in only two of the three elements.

With practice, you can learn to see the world the way your camera does, to the great benefit of your photos. For example, try setting up a natural-light scene, such as a still life with fruit. Put the camera on a tripod. Study the scene with your eyes, and then photograph it. Compare what the lens records with the image in your head.

Are they the same? Probably not. How are the two images different? Make a few notes about your perceptions as compared to what the camera captured, and then repeat the exercise with a different scene. When the image in your head begins to match the one on the camera’s LCD screen, then you’ve truly begun to see the world with a photographic eye.

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Cameras love light, that’s for sure. In general, you need the flash for indoor shots but not always. Some of the best interior photos use nothing more than light streaming in from a window. Pictures taken with only ambient light without adding flash are called existing light or natural light photos. Portraits taken in natural light have a classic feel, reminiscent of timeless paintings by great artists like Rembrandt.

Of course, relying solely on existing light isn’t always feasible, but if you can manage it, natural light has the following advantages over flash photography:

• More depth. Flash photography’s big drawback is that it illuminates only about the first ten feet of the scene. Everything beyond that fades to black. If you turn the flash off, your camera reads the lighting for the entire room. Not only is your primary subject exposed properly, but the surrounding setting is too, giving the picture more depth.
• Less harshness. The light in an existing-light photo generally comes from a variety of sources: overhead lights, windows, lamps, and reflections off walls and ceilings. Combined, these factors create soft, balanced lighting, instead of the stark, whitewashed glare that a built-in flash often generates.
• More expressiveness. Too often, flashing in your subjects’ faces produces that “deer in the headlights” stare. Existing-light pictures tend to be more subtle and expressive, because the people you’re shooting are more relaxed when they’re not being pelted by bursts of light.

The vast majority of digital cameras come with an automatic flash to compensate for any lighting deficits. In the interest of keeping the customer happy, camera makers design the flash to ensure that you get a picture every time you press the shutter buttoneven if it’s not the most attractive, artistic one. If you want to get creative and flash-free, these tools come in handy:

• Flash control. Before you ask your significant other to perch on a stool by a sunny window, make sure you know how to turn your camera’s flash on and off. (It’s not always obvious.) An unwanted blast of light is unpleasant for the model and, perhaps, embarrassing for the photographer.
• Adjustable ISO (film speed). If your camera lets you adjust the film speed, try a setting of 200 or 400 to make your camera more light sensitive. (If you have enough light for a decent exposure, though, then don’t increase the film speed, because it’ll slightly degrade the image quality.)

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Tip: To tell whether you need to increase the film speed, simply review a test shot. (On the LCD screen, zoom in, magnifying the photo, to inspect it more closely.) If the image is too dark or has motion blur, increase the film speed from 100 to 200. Take another test shot. If it still looks dark, try increasing one more time to 400 speed. And open the drapes all the way.
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• Spot meter. Consider turning on spot metering. It permits the camera to make exposure decisions based only on the subject, without being affected by the lighting in the surrounding background.
• Remote control or self-timer. Holding the camera still may well be the biggest challenge of existing-light photography. If a remote control came with your camera, use it. If not, use the camera’s self-timer feature, which counts off a few seconds before snapping the picture automatically.
• Tripod. A high-quality tripod is an optional accessory, but if you take a liking to existing-light photography, you’ll find it invaluable for holding the camera steady.
• Reflector. To help direct existing light where you need it, you can use a photographer’s reflector panel. Or you can make do with any white cardboard, paper, or sheets you have lying around (more details in a moment).

1. Keeping it steady
When you forgo the flash for a natural light portrait, the camera’s shutter has to stay open for a relatively long interval to admit enough light for a good picture. As a result, you need to keep the camera very steady, which is much easier with a tripod. Pocket tripods are great for this type of shooting. They weigh only a few ounces and steady the camera on all kinds of surfaces like tables, countertops, and so on.

Once the tripod is steady, you face another challenge: taking the picture without jiggling the camera when you press the shutter button. Even a little camera shake can blur your entire image, creating an out-of-focus appearance. So, just avoid pressing the button: Make the camera do it instead. Employ your camera’s remote control or self-timer to put some distance between your body movements and the camera.

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Tip: If your camera has burst mode (Section 1.12), here’s a golden opportunity to use it. The jar of your shutter press may ruin the first shot, but by the second or third shot of the burst, things are much steadier.
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2. Managing existing light sources
Creating a natural-light photo means learning to work with light on its own terms. You have to take your model and camera to where the good light is. Great painters of the past preferred the light coming through a north window for their portraits, especially in the early hours of the day. Try this positioning for your existing-light portraits.

To adjust your composition’s lighting you have to reposition the model, the camera, or both. But you’re not as powerless as you think. You can turn overhead lights on and off, open and close window shades, move table lamps around, and take lampshades on and off. The most common problem in existing-light photography is a shadow darkening the model’s face. Try turning your subject at a different angle to the incoming sunlight, or pull over a table lamp to illuminate the dark area.

You can also find a reflector and position it so that light bounces off the reflector onto the dark side of the model’s face. A reflector is a common piece of photographic gear; it’s essentially a big white shiny surface on its own pole. If you don’t have lighting equipment sitting around the house, but you really want this portrait to look good, just rig a big piece of white cardboard or white foam board to serve as a reflecting surface.

Figure 1. In this existing-light portrait, notice how the tones trail off quickly from light to dark, which is typical illumination from a window. To brighten the shadow areas, use a reflector to bounce the light back toward the mode. You can try a flash for fill light, but be careful not to ruin the mood of the scene. Your best bet is to use the nighttime flash mode, to preserve some of the scene’s ambience.

Once you’ve balanced the tones, take a picture and review your results. Shadowed areas usually look darker to the camera than they do to your eyes. If so, move the reflector closer to brighten the shadows. In this type of photography, you learn to look at the lighting the way the camera would see the scene, not the way you would normally view it.

3. Tweaking white balance (color balance)
Here’s a mind-bending example of the way your eyes and your camera see things completely differently. It turns out that different kinds of lightsregular incandescent lightbulbs, fluorescent office lighting, the suncast subtle tinges of color on everything they illuminate. When you shoot non-flash photos indoors or in open shade outside, you’ll get a bluish or cool cast. If you shoot without a flash under incandescent lighting, then the shots will have a warm tint, mostly yellow and red.

So why haven’t you ever noticed these different lighting artifacts? Because your brain compensates almost instantly for these different color temperatures. (Your brain does a lot of compensating for light. Ever noticed how your eyes adjust to a dark room after a couple of minutes?) Your camera, however, doesn’t have a brain. It simply grabs whatever warm or cool tints it sees, and those tints can detract from your onscreen or printed photos. For example, portraits with warmer casts are generally more pleasing to the eye. But natural light from the window imparts a bluish cast, which isn’t good for skin tones.

In the days of traditional film photography, you could compensate for (or correct) the color temperature by placing a screw-on filter over the lens. With a digital camera, you don’t need any external accessories. Almost every digital camera lets you correct the color temperature by adjusting its white balance (sometimes called color balance).

Most cameras have a little knob or menu offering icons like the following:

• A sun icon represents normal daylight conditions in direct light. (If you know about filters in film photography, the sun/daylight setting is equivalent to the Sky 1A filter.)
• A cloud icon is for overcast days, open shade, and window-illuminated interiors (81B warming filter).
• A lightbulb icon is for incandescent lighting (80A cooling filter).
• A bar-shaped icon is for fluorescent lighting (FLD fluorescent correction filter).

Figure 2. Most digital cameras let you adjust color balance. Sometimes the setting is labeled WB for white balance (essentially the same thing as color balance). Most of the time, you can leave this setting on Auto. But if the tones start looking too cool or too warm, you may want to override auto and make the adjustment yourself.

4. Taking the picture
In natural light photography, think of yourself as an artist, using light as your paintbrush. It takes time and practice to become proficient, but even your first efforts will probably surprise you with their expressiveness. Keep the following points in mind:

• Don’t skimp on setup. When you’re working with existing light, the work you do before you shoot is what determines the quality of your results. Take a moment to review your camera’s aperture-priority, self-timer, and white balance settings. If you need a tripod, borrow or improvise one so you don’t get frustrated trying to hold the camera steady.
• Don’t be too quick to delete shots from the camera before viewing them on your computer. Existing-light shots sometimes contain subtleties that don’t appear on tiny LCD screens. Images that looked uninteresting on your camera’s two-inch display may surprise you when you see them full size.
• Be patient with yourself. With time and practice, you’ll be able to calibrate your eyes so they see shadows the same way your camera does. You’ll spend less and less time testing before the shoot, and more time creating your classic image.
• Be patient with your model. During a long exposure, fidgety people mean blurry portraits. (Of course, you can use this effect to your advantage, too, if you want to create a moody interior picture with ghostlike subjects.) As the photographer, you set the tone for the shoot. It’s your job to persuade your models to sit still, put them at ease if they’re nervous, and chat with them when they’re bored.

In professional portrait photographs, everyone looks great. Surely photographers use some kind of tricksancient, carefully guarded trade secretsto make Uncle Ernie look so distinguished and handsome. On the contrary, there are no fancy secrets to great headshots. You can make any subject (or any uncle) look his best by applying the simple principles in this section whenever you shoot someone from the shoulders up.

You can take good portraits even if you have the cheapest camera on the planet. But a few additional features, like the following, go a long, long way:

• Manual or aperture-priority mode. When you take a portrait, you want clear focus on your subject and a softer background. The lenses in point-and-shoot cameras generally put everything in the frame in the same sharp focus. Manual settings, especially aperture-priority mode, give you greater control over the focal depth.
• Zoom lens. Not essential, but helpful for bringing your subject into clear foreground focus.
• Fill-in flash. Check to see if your camera’s flash offers different settings. Even if you have enough light to shoot without a flash, a reduced flash setting can help eliminate shadows from your subject’s face.

1. Soften the background
Although the next few pages show you several portrait styles, all successful portraits have one thing in common: the subject draws you in. You hardly notice the background because the photographer has intentionally downplayed it, usually by blurring it slightly. A shot with a soft-focus background has what the pros call shallow depth of field. Depth of field indicates how much of the picture is in focus. When you’re snapping your family in front of the Great Wall of China, you probably want a deep depth of field, with both foreground (family) and background (Great Wall) in clear focus. But in typical headshots, you need a shallow depth of fieldand a blurry background.

So how do you control the depth of field? Here are a few ways:

• Zoom in. At first, it doesn’t seem logical to use your camera’s zoom lens for a portrait. After all, you can get as close as you want to the subject just by walking closer. But thanks to a quirk of optics, zooming in helps create a shallow depth of field, which is just what you want for portraits. So if your camera has a zoom lens, zoom in slightly as you frame your subject. Step back a bit if necessary.
• Move the background back. The farther away your model is from the background, the softer the background appears. If you choose an ivy-covered wall as your backdrop, for example, position your subject 10, 20, or 30 feet away from the wall. Usually, the farther, the better.
• Use a portrait setting. Many cameras offer a Portrait mode, often designated on the control dial by the silhouette of a human head. Setting the camera to Portrait mode automatically creates a short depth of field, blurring the background.

If your camera has a Portrait mode indicated on this camera and many others by a silhouette of a human headyou may not have to fiddle with manual aperture settings.

• Use a wide aperture setting. As explained earlier in this chapter, two factors determine how much light fills a shot: how long the shutter remains open (the shutter speed) and how wide it opens (the aperture). In sports photography, what you care about most is usually the shutter speed. In portrait photography, what you care about most is the aperture settingbecause the size of the aperture controls the depth of field. Wide aperture settings, indicated by low numbers like f-2.8 or f-4, let lots of light through the lens (Figure below). These wide settings also help create soft backgrounds for portraits.

Top: The trick to creating a soft background, whether for a portrait or a landscape shot, is to use a large aperture setting, like f-2.8 or f-4. (Oddly enough, low f-numbers indicate larger aperture settings.) If your camera has an aperture-priority mode, you can lock in this setting and the camera sets the correct shutter speed.

Bottom: For greater depth of field (clear focus from front to back), use a higher setting like f-11 or f-16,

2. Understanding aperture-priority mode
Expensive cameras offer more control over depth of field in the form of an aperture-priority mode. This mode lets you tell the camera: “I want to control how much of this shot is in focus, so I want to set the aperture myself. You, the camera, should worry about the other half of the equationthe shutter speed.” Turning on aperture-priority mode (if your camera has it) may be as simple as changing a dial to the A or AV position, or as complicated as pulling up the camera’s onscreen menu system.

Turning on aperture-priority mode is similar to turning on your camera’s shutter-priority mode. Often, they’re right next to each other. In any case, once you’ve turned on this mode, you adjust the aperture by turning a knob or pressing the up/down buttons. On the screen, you’ll see the changing f-stop numbers, which represent different size apertures.
3. Fill-in flash
Adjust the flash settings so the flash is forced to go off. That provides a nice supplemental burst of light to better illuminate your subject. Don’t stand more than ten feet away from your subject or your fill-in flash won’t reach.

4. Taking the picture
If you can, shoot on a cloudy day, first thing in the morning or late in the afternoon, especially if you’re shooting outdoors. At these hours, the light is softer and more flattering. Otherwise, try to place the model in open shadeunder a tree, for example.

More headshot tips:

• Position your model so the backdrop is in the distance. Check for telephone poles or anything else that may appear to pierce the subject’s head.
• Stand within ten feet of your subject, so your fill-in flash reaches. Use your zoom lens so your model’s upper body fills the frame and helps soften the background. (Unwittingly, most people stand too far away from their subjects.)
• After a few frames, review your work and adjust as necessary. The soft background effect may not be as strong on a consumer-grade digicam as with a pro camera and a telephoto lens, but you’ll definitely notice a pleasant difference.

Everybody’s seen those incredible high-speed action photos of athletes frozen in mid-leap. Without these shots (and the swimsuit photos), Sports Illustrated would be no thicker than a pamphlet. Through a combination of careful positioning, focusing, lighting, and shutter-speed adjustments, you can take the very same stop action shots. Even if you never take sports photos, knowing how to freeze action lets you capture water splashes, birds in flight, and fleeting childhood moments.

While some of the techniques you’ll read about in this section work with any camera, for best results, try to get your hands on a camera that has:

• A telephoto or zoom lens. Action shots look more dramatic when your moving subject fills the frame.
• Manual or shutter-priority mode. To freeze movement without blur, your camera has to grab the shot in a fraction of a second. Both these shooting modes help that happen.
• Prefocus. A great shot can pass right by while your camera focuses. Many digital cameras let you focus in advance by pressing the shutter button halfway before you’re ready to shoot. (Check the manual to see if your camera has this feature.)
• Burst mode. If your camera lets you fire off a few pictures in rapid succession, chances are greater that you’ll get the shot with one of them.
• Spot metering. While not critical, this feature helps ensure that your focus of interest (not the background) is properly lit, and not obscured by a shadow or the sun’s glare.

You don’t need all these features for sports pictures, and you won’t use each of them in every shot. But knowing how these tools work and when to summon them helps expand your shooting repertoire.

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Often, the difference between an interesting home movie and one that’s intolerable is editing. This applies to the video you capture with your digital camera as well. Chances are your digicam came bundled with software to help you edit your movies. If it didn’t, or if you don’t like that software, you can use QuickTime Pro and just a few simple commands to stitch together your video clips into short movies.

Many digital media fans are already familiar with QuickTime. The free player is available for Windows and Macintosh computers, and chances are you already have it on yours. If so, you can use it to watch the video snippets you capture with your digital camera.

You can purchase a registration key for $30 from the Quick-Time web site that unlocks a number of additional powerful features, including:

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Different light sources, such as tungsten light bulbs, produce light at different color temperatures than normal daylight (different temperatures often result in pictures that are “cooler” or “bluish” in some situations, or “warmer” or “reddish” in others). Your optical/nervous system compensates for these variations in color, but cameras need a little help as you move from outdoors to indoors.

Film cameras rely on color correction filters to capture natural tones under a variety of conditions. Digital cameras make things easier by providing a built-in white balance adjustment. This control not only allows you to capture pictures with accurate tones, but also enables you to preview the effect on your LCD monitor before you take the shot. Think of the white balance control as your own personal filter collection, built right into the camera.

The default setting for your camera is auto white balance. This mode works amazingly well most of the time. To test for yourself, point the camera at a different light source, such as a regular light bulb, and watch in the LCD monitor as the image slowly goes from very amber to a less surreal off-white.

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Digital images should be treated like any other important computer files: they should be archived and kept in a safe place. Most computers have built-in optical drives for burning compact discs and DVDs, both of which are reasonable archiving media. If you use optical discs for archiving, consider making two sets of backups—one for your home, and another to be kept in a remote location—just in case one set gets damaged.

Another archiving approach, and one that is easier to manage than using optical media, is to save your pictures to external hard drives. The advantages of external drives over optical media are that they have greater capacity (250 GB and upward), have faster read/write times, and are easier to catalog.

If you really want to cover all the bases, back up your images onto two external hard drives and store them in different locations—one at home and another at the office. That way, not only are you protected if one drive fails, as hard drives sometimes do, but you also don’t have to worry about losing your pictures if there is fire or water damage at one of the locations.

Some photographers like to use external hard drives for backing up at home, then save their most valuable images to optical media for storage at a remote location. This hybrid system strikes a good balance between convenience and reliability. And for the super fastidious (this is my category), think about a system that uses two sets of external hard drives in separate locations, plus one set of optical media in a third place. Does it sound a little over the top? Well, how important are your pictures to you?

Regardless of which media you use, when preparing to back up your photos, take a few minutes to figure out how you want to organize the files before you copy them to your backup media. Since digital cameras usually assign names such as IMG_3298.JPG to your pictures, you won’t be able to go back and find those Paris shots by reading the filenames. Yet, you’re probably not going to want to rename each picture individually, either.

Instead, give a descriptive name to the folder that contains images of a like kind, such as Paris Trip 2002. You can always browse the contents of the folder with an image browser once you’re in the general vicinity.

No matter which method you embrace, the important thing is to have an orderly system and a regular backup routine. You already know how frustrating it is to look for an old picture buried in a shoebox deep within your closet. Consider digital photography your second chance in life, and take advantage of your computer’s ability to store and retrieve information.

Note:
For more information on managing digital photographs, especially on a professional level, see The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers, by Peter Krogh (O’Reilly).