However, if you hang out at the pickup counters at processing labs, you might think that the Grinch and his siblings were doing all the processing and printing and deliberately adding red-eye, green-eye, blur, and chopping off the heads of beloved family members and precious pets.
They are.
The Grinch is poor preparation, composition and failure to know your camera.
As people leaf through envelope after envelope of prints they have puzzled and pitiful looks as if someone had eaten their only candy cane or gotten all the good pieces out of the Whitman's Sampler box and left fingerprints in the rest.
Slough off this potential failure and stand strong with your camera, memory card, film, tripod and flash.
There are many earlier posts that will be of help also. There will be fireworks on New Years so read the post on doing that well.
Here is some information and important suggestions that will slap the Grinch out of your images:
1. Batteries, batteries, batteries. Your feature-rich electronica eats battery power and the standard battery that comes with your little or big camera is not much. Get a High Capacity battery (probably from a Batteries Plus or comparable store) and keep the original and new one properly charged. That means reading instructions and following them. I'm a big fan of rechargeable batteries and have 60 AA and 30 AAAs. I also have rechargeable battery packs and a nice charging station. My backup is a big fresh pack of HD consumables. NICAD & L-ION batteries work best when drained and recharged regularly, just like us. Treadmill, rest, eat, treadmill, nap - work it. To whom it may concern.
2. Film, film, film, film. Memory cards, MC, MC. They are cheap so get big, fast ones (150x+). It doesn't take many 10 meg images to fill up a 1 or 2 gig card. You will be shooting RAW or BIG JPGS. Cards fail or maybe get misplaced - it's best to have backups - and download your images frequently. We KNOW people with film cameras that have 4 Christmases, 3 Easters, birthdays and a funeral or two still in their camera and the battery is corroding. Don't blush, rush to the lab right now and save those images! Download and backup your digital images according to my earlier posts. Just do it and don't whine. It will keep the HO in your HOlidays!
3. Flash. Read the manual and learn to adjust the flash output. Cutting back on the flash will reduce the red-eye. You can also increase the ISO. If your subjects are tired, excited or tippling, their pupils are going to be dilated. This causes red-eye. Shoot from an angle. Diffuse the flash and/or have your subjects look at each other. Or, just plan to fix red-eye for a month.
4. Flash ... part 2. Even on bright days, use the flash out of doors. This will put light on pink faces and put light under billed caps.
5. Image stabilization. Great idea. However, when using a tripod, turn it off. If you don't the camera will create motion. Don't confuse the camera.
6. Natural light. Most Christmas lights fall into the tungsten color. If you shoot them at daylight temperature they will look rich and warm and yellow. If you select tungsten in your camera menu, they will look just like your eyes see them. Shoot them both ways and play with the curves in PS. Babies and pets look very holidayish under the yellowish lights. This is the same deal when photographing a fire. It is yellow. If you are photographing tungsten, make sure that light from your kitchen's fluorescent lights don't leak into the image. Nasty. If people have light foundation on and get fluorescent light on that, we are back at Halloween.
7. Outdoor lights. There are some great decorations around. You will need to have an ISO of 200 or so and a fairly high f stop. Your shutter speed needs to be kind of fast. If you have a slow shutter speed the tracing lights will blend and you will get a muddle of an image. If that is what you want, go ahead.
You will probably do BEST with a tripod, but image stabilization is OK too.
8. Automatic. See what your camera thinks you want. This setting was created by a non-photographer engineer in Asia and is an average of everything. You are not average. After you are familiar with your camera, set the saturation, sharpness and everything else to suit YOU. Automatic is the Drive-through #1 on any fast food board in the US. How many times do YOU choose that? I have never said or heard anyone I was with say, "A number one, that's all." That's not why you bought your camera either.
9. People. Get closer, closer and closer. Get Horizontal images for 4 images or more and Vertical for 3 or less. That's not a RULE, since I don't LIKE rules, but break out of the bitty image in the middle of the frame habit.
10. Photograph some little things. Candles, a greeting card, some fruit, some frost-covered plant. A bow and ribbon. A cat with a bow and ribbon. Then photograph some big things. There are some beautiful stained glass windows that tell the Christmas Story. There are also some live Nativity scenes around.
11. Get your camera and yourself into the holiday mix. The city of Raleigh has an ice-skating rink this season. I hope people are using it. There are people going wild with decorations, there is the Capitol and there are commercial decorations. That's in the area of Oakwood and Krispi Kreme. BTW, neon is also in the tungsten color range.
12. Be snappy (take pictures) this holiday season. It is so easy to set imaging aside and not take pictures. Make yourself an assignment with specific images you would like to have.
After the season passes and the ornaments and symbols and things are packed away, you could have a trove of great pictures that could tell a story that could connect you to the joy of this great time of the year. © Tim tim@timjohnsonphoto.com www.timjohnsonphoto.com
No comments:
Post a Comment