Perspective

A flower iced over after a rare ice storm in Fayetteville, North Carolina January 11, 2011. P.S. Friends don't let friends shoot dead center.

   I like this photo. But I hate how I composed it. At least my subject is clear. Someone, who is not named me, could argue it's framed; the ice kind of frames up the flower. But luckily for me this post isn't about composition  [wait, every post is about composition] this post isn't going to focus on composition [there I like that better] it's about perspective.

It always amazes me how rarely I see a people with camera's bend their knees.

   What probably doesn't readily jump out at you at first glace, maybe second glace, is that this little flower is on the ground. About 68 inches [that's a guesstimate] below where my eyes normally sit. I had to get all the way down on the ice for this shot.

   A brief note about color temperature; notice how a part of the ice just behind the flower  is white and the ice in the foreground is blue? Yeah, that's because the flower was in the shade and I didn't use a flash. This resulted in two light sources at two different color temperatures. Had I used a flash to overpower the shade the foreground ice would have been white as well. Of course, the blue ice in the WAY back still would have been blue. but really all that means is that i needed two flashes!

I find that the photos that capture me the most are ones that aren't taken from the height of 5 to 7 feet.

   What do I mean by that? Well quite simply the photos most people take while standing up don't show the world from a unique perspective but rather an ordinary perspective. Of course there are many great photos to be had from an ordinary perspective, but the ones that really capture, more often than not come from unique perspectives. 

   Luckily for us, unique perspectives aren't that hard to find. Climb a ladder, jump up on a truck, bend your knees, heck you can even lay down with your camera. You don't need to lean out of a Blackhawk [But it doesn't hurt to be someplace unique] for a unique perspective.

G.I. Joe: Real American Hero

WWII Veteran, Sgt. Maj. Raymond Sylvester, stands with Paratroopers from the U.S. Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command at the American cemetery in Normandy, France on June 6, 2011. These Paratroopers are members of Task Force Normandy, which is a multinational force of U.S., U.K., French, and German Soldiers, Sailors, and Airmen in a combined effort to remember and celebrate the 67th Anniversary of the D-Day operations. (U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Felix R. Fimbres)

I just want to thank all the men and women who have made sacrifices for our great nation; because of them I have been given the greatest gift of all: Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

It's all about the choices you make

Soldiers from the U.S. Army Civil Affairs & Psychological Operations Command (Airborne) prepare to conduct an night jump from Camp Mackall, N.C., on July 19, 2011 (U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Felix R. Fimbres)

   Did you know that at night time it's dark? Crazy right? Also, you should know that I did desaturate this image a little to help with the noise.

   Taking photographs is all about making choices. What equipment to use, where to shoot from, how long should I wait for something to happen. Do I know what's going to happen?

   In this photo I knew what was going to happen and I was aware of my surroundings.  

   I shot this with at  f/1.8 @ 1/13th of a second and 3200 ISO  from a tripod. There isn't a whole lot of blur because there wasn't a whole lot of moving going on. Well, minus the propeller on the left, but I was looking for that motion blur.

   So why did I choose those settings? Well  I went with an ISO of 3200 because that was highest my camera would go without introducing an unacceptable amount of noise. The lower settings on the other hand just wouldn't give me enough light without a huge aperture.

   I knew the CASA is built in such a way that having more than one person on the ramp at the same time is dangerous; I knew those paratroopers would be standing around not moving very much as they loaded the aircraft one by one. But they would still be moving, so I couldn't go too slow or I'd have a blurry mess but I didn't have to go very fast either.

   Because I knew the limitations of my flash [just a few feet] I knew using one wasn't an option; it was just too far and the area too large an area to light everything up properly without a ridiculous amount of lighting. 

   I could have gotten closer but then I would have needed a a wider angle lens. Problem, because I didn't have a f/1.8 wide angle lens I would have needed an even longer shutter speed and/or upped my ISO.

When it's dark I need to get the shutter speed right, when it's bright outside I need to get my aperture right, then again when it involves motion shutter again is key, do I want blur or do I want to freeze something?

   Photography is all about decision making. I like to make my decisions as soon as I get to an area. Sometimes I make bad choices and have reconsider my plan of attack. Do I mount the Flash? What's the lowest ISO I can  get? What two lenses am I going to have on my cameras [yes, I like to shoot with two cameras] Should I be shooting in shutter priority, Aperture Priority, or do I need to worry about manual settings?

I dislike manual settings, I like to let my camera do the math, I worry about the composition.

   Did I just blow your mind? A photographer who hates manual shooting? Camera's are pretty smart nowadays, they get exposure right a lot of the time. When I used an underwater disposable camera to take photos I was at the complete mercy of the camera and the exposure came out just fine. When I do use manual settings I set it and forget it. At least until lighting conditions change.

   Yes, sometimes I am forced to use manual mode because my camera isn't as smart as me, but 99% of the time it knows what to do. A camera however, cannot compose.

   And that is why when I look at a photo the first thing I look at is composition. The second, third, fourth and fifth things I look at? Also, composition. 

I make my technical choices up front so that when my eye is in the viewfinder the only choices I'm making are about my subject.

ISO and you

Paratroopers from the 301st TPC conducted nighttime Airborne Operations leaving from San Diego, California and landing on Edwards Air Force Base on January 21, 2011. (U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Felix R. Fimbres)

   Believe it or not, there was a time when I disliked flash. "Why use flash? I'll just turn up my ISO!" "No one likes flash in their eyes," "It's more 'tactical' to use flash," "The flash seems to have a mind of its own," and a plethora of other excuses to not use flash.

   So, for those of you non-converted, what to do? I like ISO. No, I love ISO. [I love flash more...] Sensors get better every other month it seems and after playing with a NIKON D3s a couple years ago in pitch black conditions at 102,000 I was impressed. Yes, at 102,000 the noise is ridiculous, but that fact that I could shoot 1/60 at all and get something in those conditions blew my mind.

   But this wasn't shot with a D3S, it was shot with a t2i (an old canon entry level dslr) with an ISO1600 f/3.5 (not a very wide aperture) at 1/60th. You'll notice it's pretty noisy at 1600, but it gets the job done. It was sunset so I wanted to keep the oranges and I didn't have a gel with me to match the light of my flash with the light of the sunset.

   At least the higher ISO got the job done at dusk; good luck getting anything without a flash, tripod, or a much wider aperture after the sun goes down without cranking out your ISO way up. A tripod would have been nice to have, but even then I probably wouldn't have been able to capture this blur free even with a tripod, these soldiers where moving pretty quickly. A 1.8 lens would have been great to have here as well, which I did in fact have, but it wasn't the angle I wanted.

   My lens was as wide as it would go, and my shutter speed was as slow as I could hold it without blur. Which really left me with just one option, kick up the ISO.

   "If you love ISO much why is it your last option?"

  Because it saves the day. You can't always have the gear you want, but being able to quickly and easily make sacrifices in quality for improving your lighting is better than nothing. In the above case I wanted to use a wide angle lens, which only opened up to 3.5. I had a 50 mm lens that opened up to 1.8, but it wasn't the angle I wanted. I was able to keep the lens I wanted and still got the shot because I upped my ISO.

A few words about noise

   In the Halycon days of film increasing your ISO meant putting in a new roll of film and in exchange you got some fairly pleasing grain. Grain was a by product of the increased sensitivity. Nowadays uppping your ISO is as easy as a couple presses of a button, but the by product of increasing digital sensitivity is noise.

   It's like when you're listening to a low quality audio file and you turn your stereo to max volume; sure it's loud, but it's not very clear, that's noise. You're turning the volume on your camera with low quality light and the end result is a noisy photo. The colors are a little off sometimes, and you'll have a rouge pixels that are green, yellow, or red instead of blue.

Flash motion photography

Pfc. Amber Nolan, 450th Civil Affairs Bn., rucks across Fort Meade, Md. during the 352nd best warrior competition on April 2, 2012. (U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Felix R. Fimbres)

   Wow, it's been a busy couple of weeks for me personally. But it's time to get back on the photo bus. So lets get back to it shall we.

   I know, I know I've been extolling the virtues of flash for what seems like forever; I'll get off my flash horse after this post. I promise. [No, that's probably a lie, but I'll give it a rest for a bit!]

 

Points of interest. Check. Yellow road line leading to subject, check.
Orange/white line leading to subject, check. But those eyes, they just keep pulling me off the frame...sigh. 

   I'm not going to lie, I like this photo. It's not technically correct either, I mean, just look at those eyes pulling me off the frame. Yuck. Okay fine, clear subject, leading lines, subject is in points of interest. The exposure awesome. It's technically pretty good. Just not flawless.

   When I shot this however my concern was getting the patch included in the shot. As a public affairs soldier I was always looking to brand my images. I could go on an on about all the good stuff my unit does on a daily basis around the world, but we certainly don't have very much name brand recognition, at least not yet anyway. But lets get back to this shot.

   Unfortunately a side effect of using flash to get blur is, well, you get blur where the flash doesn't shine.

   [Bad pun. I know. I'm pretty sure you're here FOR the puns tho... right?]

   So the patch itself is a little blurrier than i would have liked it, and her eyes aren't looking over her shoulder, but that's uncontrolled action for you. Having a second flash to specifically light her her patch would have done the trick; [at least in my head it does, using just theory] as it stands there wasn't enough umph to get the black portions of the patch clear.

   

   Luckily her eyes and face are crisp and clean. The flash helped the colors [what little colors that are] on the subject really pop. And most importantly I captured motion.

   Yes, flash freezes motion [surprisingly I haven't done a post about how to use flash to freeze motion...don't worry I'll talk about some other subjects before I go back to flash] but with careful management of your shutter speed you can use it to mix and match both movement and the lack thereof. 

   What we're seeing here is 1/30 of a second [at f/22] which isn't a very long period at all, but it's twice as long as 1/60th of a second [What I normally shoot for blur free objects which are standing still] and it's glacially slow when compared to most sports shots which are shot in the high hundreds and even thousands. 

   So really, 1/30th of a second is a heck of a long time.

   Just not at night.

   In regards to light, specifically the light bouncing off our subject, the blur part you see around her is where she was at the beginning of the 1/30th [lets just call this the first half of the 1/30th of a second] and the crisp parts of here is where my flash went off, and captured her [lets call this the second half.]

   I used the "rear shutter" on my camera to ensure my flash went off at the end. This gives it some forward/upward motion. You'll have to open up your manual to find out how to make your camera use the flash on the rear shutter. If I had used the flash normally it would have given the effect of backward motion as the flash would have fired during the first half and then blur collecting during the second half; so the blur would have been in front of the crispy parts and not behind the crispy parts.

Which by the way is what happened with her sleeve. While her body was moving towards the camera her arm was going away from the camera, so the blurry part happens in the first half and the stop motion happens in the second half, causing blur in front.