Shooting Fireworks

With the Fourth of July holiday being this past weekend I thought it was a good time to post on a question that many student photographers ask, “How do I shoot fireworks?”

Shooting fireworks can be tricky because first of all, you are shooting at night, which many photographers find difficult to begin with. Second, because your shooting at night, your auto focus will be totally useless as will any automatic modes on your camera. In this post I am going to give you my tips for shooting fireworks and they are pretty much the same that any other photographer will give you.

Check your local weather reports. Even though fireworks are generally used in the U.S. for July Fourth, they are often used to ring in the New Year as well. Even though it is July, there is no guarantee it will not rain as we had here in Georgia this year.
Scout your location. Get to your location early and make certain you will have a clear view to the action. If your fireworks are happening across a bay or lake, you may want to shoot from the opposite side as the reflections on the water look amazing!

Shooting over Boston Harbor photo ©Michael Phillips

As far as gear and settings, you want to shoot fireworks as a long exposure usually as this will give you your best shots and make for some really nice light effects when the fireworks detonate.

1.) A DSLR camera that is capable of BULB shutter mode. Some of you may be asking, what is BULB mode. BULB mode is a setting that allows you to press your shutter button and have the shutter stay open as long as the button is pressed. On my cameras, BULB has it’s own mode on the dial labeled with a ‘B’, but on your camera, you might just have to keep going lower and lower with your shutter speed until you see BULB on your LCD.

A nice, red burst captured at Covington, GA Fourth of July show

2.) Since we are shooting long exposure, you will need a tripod. It is not possible to have long shutter times with hand holding your camera as hand-shake will blur and ruin all your images.
Cable release. This is a cable and button or remote that plugs into your camera and allows you to trigger the shutter without touching the camera. Even with your camera on a tripod if you try pressing the shutter button on the camera, you will blur and ruin your shot. Recommended shutter time is 2.5-4 seconds.

3.) Set your ISO. When shooting fireworks you want to use your lowest possible ISO setting. If shooting a Canon it will be 50 or 100, depending on your camera model, if shooting Nikon it will be 200 most likely. You don’t need to worry about low light, the fireworks are bright when they go off.

4.) Aperture. Set your aperture at around F/11-F22. You want your aperture as narrow as possible to let in the least amount of light and get the best final images. Aperture is something you may have to play with on the fly as your shoot, but start at F/11 and adjust from there.


When shooting fireworks, open your shutter when you see the rocket going up into the air and hold it open as it explodes into it’s colors, then release. If you want to make more of a full light effect, hold it open as several of them burt open in a row and you will capture all of the explosions. If your shots look too dark, then move your aperture open more, say F/8, or if they are too blow out then move to F/16 and try again. Also remember to leave your White Balance on auto and you should be fine. If you are looking to make the sky bluer in the background, then use Tungsten or if you want more orange, then use cloud or shade on your White Balance.

Covington, GA Fourth of July fireworks finale

That’s pretty much it, the rest is trial and error, shoot and adjust until you think they look good. Once you have your settings, I recommend turning off your auto preview as it is distracting and slows your camera performance down. Now go shoot some fireworks!

Comments/Questions

Using Your Strobes with a "T" Series Canon

One of the issues new students have been running into is difficulty getting their strobes to work with their “T” series Canon camera purchased through the Art Institute.

The tricky issue here is that the Canon “T” series cameras are a consumer grade DSLR and they are not equipped with a PC sync port like the professional and prosumer bodies are. Since the “T” series Canons do not have this PC sync port, they cannot trigger the strobes directly and you have to use a Master/Slave set up.

Most strobes are designed so that if you are using a Speedlite, the strobes will automatically fire when they see the flash of your Speedlite external flash. Now, what I did in my case was I used my Canon Speedlite mounted in the hotshoe on a Canon T3i and then pointed the Speedlite behind me and bounced it off the wall, which in turn fired my strobes without fail.

Hotshoe adapter that adds a PC Sync port to your camera

I know some students have told me that they have tried firing their strobes with their flash and it only works once in a while. I believe the problem here is they are trying to use their Canon’s built in flash, which is not powerful enough to make the strobes fire reliably. I know from my own personal testing in my studio this weekend I was only able to get the strobes to fire once in a while with the Canon’s built in flash, but when using one of my Speedlites, the strobes fired every time.

Strobe end of the Sync port

Now I know you may be saying, “well that’s all fine and good but I don’t have a Speedlite external flash and cannot afford to buy a $300-$600 Speedlite to make my strobes work.” Well, the good news is, you can get the inexpensive Bower External flash at Walmart for like $40-$60 or you can go on Amazon and buy one of the Chinese Yongnuo Speedlites, which are knockoffs of Canon Speedlites and run anywhere from $30-$65, depending on what model you buy.

Another thing I found out from another student, Jessi James is the hotshoe adapter that came with your trigger system, should be able to be used as an add-on PC Sync port. What this means is attach the piece to your Canon’s hotshoe mount and then plug your sync cable’s 1/8” end into the trigger system on your camera and the other, 1/4” end into one of your strobes. I could not personally test this part because all of my sync cables are PC to 1/4”, I have none that are 1/8” on one end and 1/4” on the other. Hopefully this information will help those of you who have had problems with your strobe kits.

One last note that I believe some students are having trouble with. Every camera has a maximum shutter sync speed, this is the fastest you can set your shutter when using flash or strobe lights. Check your owner's manual or Google to find out what the max is for your camera model, some it's 1/160, some it's 1/200. With many of the consumer grade DSLRs if you set the shutter too high it will effect how well your strobes fire. On my old Canon 1D Mark II if I set it too high, it would actually cause the camera snap a photo of the mirror as it moved. Now get out there and shoot those studio assignments.

Comments/Questions

Get out of Auto Mode

Happy Sunday Everyone, my name is Bill and I am the new Sunday Ambassador. I am a Senior at AIOP and will be here with you at least until I graduate in January. If you have any questions or need to reach me you can email sundayambassador@gmail.com. Now, let's get into my first Blog post!

One of the challenges when starting out as a photographer is getting yourself out of your comfort zone. Many students find themselves using their Auto mode on their cameras because they are intimidated by the Manual mode.

    When using Manual mode, you have to know how to use all of the settings on the camera, what is known as the “Holy trinity” of photography. What I mean by this is ISO, Aperture and Shutter Speed. Once you have the hang of these three settings on your camera and how to use them to create the proper exposure, you are well on your way to becoming an accomplished photography professional.

    Now it doesn’t matter if you shoot with Canon, Nikon, Sony or another manufacturer’s camera, they all have these three basic settings and balancing them is how to create the proper exposure. Additionally, all of these cameras have whats known as an exposure meter and it is usually visible on the LCD screen on the back of the camera, as well as in the viewfinder.

The exposure meter in the camera is the set of tick marks toward the top of the screen with the numbers from left to right starting with -3 and moving to +3 on the right. “Perfect” exposure is the point in the dead center with the 0 and each tick mark is 1/3 of an F-stop. When your exposure meter is to the left of the 0, your shot will be under exposed and when it’s to the right of the 0, your shot will be over exposed. The next thing you are probably asking is “ok, how do I move my indicator to the 0 when I am taking a photo, is there a proper sequence?” Yes there is and I am going to share that with you now.

    One of the things that throws new photographers off is figuring out how to adjust their settings under Manual mode so that they get a nice, clean shot with “perfect” exposure. I will share the formula that I use. The first thing you want to do is set your shutter speed and the best shutter speed to use is one that is proportional to the focal length of your lens, especially if your
lens doesn’t have IS (Canon’s Image Stabilization) VR (Nikon’s Vibration Reduction) to compensate for the shake of your hand as you hold your camera. Many students don’t realize that if you set your shutter speed too low it will actually emphasize hand shake and their images turn out blurry. So, let’s say you are using a 70-300mm lens and you are shooting at the 300mm end of your focal length, you want to set your shutter speed to 320 or 400 as it will compensate for the camera shake and your photos should turn out nice and clear and not blurry.

    The next piece of the formula is the Aperture of your camera/lens combination. You want to start with your lens at it’s widest Aperture, or lowest number if it’s easier to remember that way, so on your 70-300mm lens, let’s say the Aperture is F/4-5.6. This means that when you are shooting at 70mm your widest Aperture is F/4 and as you zoom in with the lens the widest is F/5.6 at 300mm. So on your 70-300mm lens at 300mm you start at F/5.6 and you can narrow the Aperture from there to reduce the amount of light that enters your lens. Now I don’t like to go too small on my Aperture, so I will usually top at around F/8-10. At this point you are probably wondering what ISO you should use. Well if you ask most professional photographers they will tell you that you want to use the lowest ISO you can to get the shot. Most pros won’t use anything higher than ISO 800 and the reason is as you raise your ISO you introduce more noise into your photos. What is noise you ask, noise is the little speckles you see in your images when the ISO is too high as in the example photo below, which I took in my office with low light at night time.

If you look you will see the little speckles of noise in this shot because I used ISO 3200, which on my older Canon 5D causes noise as it does not have the newer electronics of the Canon 5D Mark III, which can use ISO 3200 with less noise in the final image. But in order to prevent noise entirely, I recommend starting with your ISO at 100 or 50 if you have a Pro body that can do ISO 50, most consumer cameras like the Canon T3i you can get through AI has ISO 100 as it’s bottom end.

    So now that we have talked about ISO if you start at ISO 100 and you are shooting outdoors in good daylight, then you want to only adjust your shutter speed and Aperture to get your shot to “perfect” exposure. Now, let’s say you are shooting in low light and want to get to perfect exposure and you are using say the Canon 85mm F/1.8 USM portrait lens. In this case, again start with ISO 100 and your shutter speed at 100 and then open your Aperture wider to introduce more light, so instead of using F/5.6, open those blades and get your Aperture down to F/2 or F/1.8 and see if that will get you to the 0 on your exposure meter. If Aperture does not do the trick, then start adjusting your ISO higher but I would recommend capping it as ISO 800. If at ISO 800 you are still too under exposed then it’s time to introduce a flash to your shot. The flash will help raise the amount of light in the room, but I do not recommend using your camera’s built in flash, I would recommend an external flash preferably one that has bounce and zoom and turn the flash to point behind you at the ceiling or a wall so that the light will not be too harsh. Equipped with the flash, you can now set your ISO much lower and reduce the possibility of noise in your images.

    Now you know the formula for using your camera in Manual mode, so get out there make some awesome images! Please feel free to comment and ask any questions you might have.

 

Comments/Questions

Get More Confidence with Outdoor Flash Photography

My current class, Portraiture, has been seriously testing my skills with specific instruction and although I am feeling more confident about using my strobes I am still facing some issues on how much knowledge I still lack in problem-solving photography obstacles.  I have been scouting locations and scheduling extra shoots not only for added practice but also to cover myself for when I make those inevitable errors like forgetting to reset a setting--I have actually done a few shoots where my Auto-Focus was set to manual and I never caught it until I caught previews of noticeably-blurry photos--no one else noticed it either, but I still felt so disappointed in myself.

In an effort to get better results with my on-location, outdoor shoots using flash I had to do some extra research to help me understand what it really means about strobes being controlled by aperture and ambient light controlled by shutter speed and how to effectively use flash photography outdoors during daylight hours.  I recommend reading the entire article here but I will highlight the points that I found very informative.

An Introduction to Outdoor Flash Photography

If you're like me and knew so little about the field of photography, the challenges these classes offer to get us real-world experience should be accepted as a means to acquire or hone our skills.  Many of these assignments will provide us opportunities to venture out of the studio where we face even more elements for consideration.  Good time management is very important as well as understanding your environment.  The studio gives us greater control but how do you set up your strobes during the day..?  Using ambient light and likely a reflector card would be the first go-to, maybe even a speedlight, when shooting outdoors during the day, but effectively using flash photography outdoors can be both an invaluable skill and fun to experiment with.  This Nature photographer here cannot resist the urge to be shooting outside so it was important for me to learn how to be able to combine the two for portraiture -- Double bonus!

The first problem we face is balancing the mixed light.  You have natural ambient light and flash to consider so make time to do a custom white balance using your gray card.  

Next, since we cannot control the sun we can effectively control the strobes to light the scene.  It is often noted that we should avoid shooting when the sun is high but rather shoot early or shoot around sunset.  Sometimes we cannot avoid it so the best approach when using strobes is to first set the exposure on your camera to match the available light.  You will need to keep an eye on your shutter speed so that you are metering for an exposure that is within your sync speed.  This will help you determine the aperture at which to meter your strobes.  It is important to take test shots beforehand to obtain the correct exposure balance before you start shooting because natural ambient light can change pretty fast.  You will also need to determine the quality of light you want to create by using modifiers appropriately and also getting creative with how you use them such as for bouncing light for use as fill light as you will see later when discussing cross lighting.

 Depending on how much you want to over- or under-expose the background will determine the level of drama you want to create.  This is where we learn what it means about what shutter speed and aperture control.  Changing the shutter speed slower than sync speeds typically around 1/200th will control the exposure of the background.  Slowing it down will brighten up the background thus lessening the contrast and opening up the shadow regions.  The aperture will control the subject and how over- or under-exposed it is.  Say you metered for f/8 @ 1/200th and you are ok with the illumination of the background but you want to emphasize your subject by making them brighter you would open up the aperture to f/5.6 or f/4 or something similar and let more light in.  If you wanted them a bit more under-exposed you would stop down the aperture and close it down to something similar to f/9 or f/11 while the background remains constant.

Something to consider about light placement is outdoor cross-lighting.  This is where the lights face the direction of the sun and the model is captured in between--something comparable to shooting under the mid-day sun with no shade.  It is highly recommended to have the sun illuminating your subject and your strobes fill their shadowed side or you will end up running into issues with them squinting.  Follow the same instructions for metering and checking the desired exposure.

These tips will help you achieve more effective outdoor lighting and  increased success when using your strobes outside.  As with pretty much everything we learn, practice does indeed make perfect and hard work almost always pays off.  Let your passion and curiosity inspire you to be the best photographer you can be.  Do you have tips about flash photography outside or questions I might be able to answer?  Please leave a comment below!  

Works Cited

Eftaiha, Diana. "An Introduction to Outdoor Flash Photography." photography.tutsplus. Envato Pty Ltd., 15 Dec. 2010. Web. 8 Aug. 2014. <http://photography.tutsplus.com/articles/an-introduction-to-outdoor-flash-photography--photo-4272>

All images are my own and from my recent experiences using my strobes during the day.

Sunday Spotlight On: Getting It Right On Site

My first day in “Art School” as my daughter calls it, I was given a camera and told to go shoot and come back. I started off at The Art Institute of Raleigh Durham and I thought that I was the best student photographer amongst my peers. After I arrived back in the classroom and loaded the photos onto the screen I was mortified by the gasps and the critique that I had received.  I didn’t know what was wrong! I mean certainly my images were on the level of a professional who charges $1000 an hour. In actuality I was so wrong! The images were blurry, camera shake, white balance was off and just all around terrible! One thing that I will never forget is a Professor of mine telling me that if I do not know it, then to cheat. What?! Yes, cheat. She advised me to write down almost everything from the white balance, aperture and shutter speed and always refer to it when I am shooting until I no longer need it. Today there are tons of websites that offers the same thing.

Courtesy of lifehack.org

Photoshop has spoiled a lot of photographers out there. Making things too easy to edit in post production limits some photographers to "get it right on site." Proper lighting is essential to a good photographer's practice. I could only imagine photographing a session and you let your clients view the photos on your camera and they are all wrong. Imagine what they will think if they see themselves too warm or too cool on camera.

Courtesy of lifehack.org

F-stops are numbers that all real photographers must know. Don't be caught without knowledge of what each one of these mean! These numbers depends on your DOF and how much light your camera is letting in.

Courtesy of lifehack.org

As students and professionals we are always learning every time we pick up our camera to shoot. I will admit that if I am in a class that is a studio setting and then I go back and shoot outside of the studio I have to think for a minute on what my settings should go back to. I have made it a habit for me to daily check my settings on my camera and take a shot in the conditions that I am in and time myself on how fast I can get to the right settings. I like to keep my skills sharp because I never know when I might come across the one event that I need to capture but I missed it fumbling with my camera settings.

Happy Shooting!

I am your Funday Sunday Ambassador!



Work Cited:

Life Hack. "The Ultimate Photography Cheat Sheet Every Photography Lover Needs." Life Hack. ND. Web. 29 March 2014.

Photographing a Moving Target

Good Morning, AIPOD World! This past weekend I had the privilege to document the first annual retreat for a non-profit organization called Girls with Guts. These girls really do have a lot of guts to deal triumphantly with the physical ordeals they live with on a day-in and day-out basis.

One of the activities they participated in was a zip-line over a deep ravine. I stood down below in the ravine and tried to photograph each of them as they traversed it in a 16-second trip. Using my 300mm lens with my file size on Camera Raw so I got the max amount of digital file, I focused on them at the starting point, and tried to follow them across, turning as they passed overhead. It sounds much easier than it was. They started in the woods, up a stairway in the trees. This photographed best at ISO 1250 at f/19 at 1/125 sec. By the time they were overhead the camera was metering f/19 at 1/750 sec. Then they went back into wooded area and the metering changed back to f/19 at 1/125 sec.

photos by Connie Rohne

So how do you manage your camera in a situation like that. Believe me I was desperate enough to try “P” for “program” but those results were not pretty. What were the main problems? First, my camera could not decipher where to focus quickly enough, when I was set on auto focus. So that meant I had to be able to manually focus-quickly. Second moving from dark treed areas to clear sky overhead was an extremely drastic light change. I would have loved to change my ISO from 1250 to 100 when overhead, but that was impossible in an 4 second time frame, and then changing back again for the other side.

I tried the AV (aperture priority) mode, thinking I could keep my shutter speed consistent and change my aperture to control the light getting in. Setting my aperture at 4.0 was, however, a great recipe for out of focus images with subjects moving so quickly over me. The lighting concept was right, but there was too much variation in light. Also I needed the higher ISO to get more detail in the dark areas in the trees. Overhead the aperture setting wouldn't allow for enough change to control the light getting in at that ISO.

So back to M, manual, my mainstay.  I could focus with one hand, and dial my shutter speed with the other.  My subjects were traveling about 500 feet in 16 seconds, or just over 31 feet per second. Setting my aperture to f/19 gave me a good depth of field to catch them in focus. I really needed a high shutter speed to freeze their movement. I found the 1/125 sec gave me a nice crisp image. That took care of both ends of the zip line in the wooded area. When they passed over my head 1/125 second was totally blown out, you could barely see the shape of a person in the brightness. Dialing my shutter speed up as they came out into the skylight to 1/500 or 1/750 gave me beautiful blue skies and still enough details in the shadows on my subjects to capture great expressions.

This was a new challenge for me. Actually this was a week of new challenges for me. I hope to share some more of them with you next week.

Have a great day. Go out and try something new and challenging!