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light and shadow
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In the Old City today I ran into a film shoot. I ended up as another extra and they filmed me taking pictures of these three pretend street entertainers. Couldn’t ask for a better photo opportunity than this! Anyway, as you can see the fellow at the back was in the light whereas the two at the front were in shade. What are the best settings to use in order to get the two at the front brighter (specially the fellow on the left) and the one at the back less bright, or is it an impossible task without flash? I note the settings I used on the camera. I was focusing on the fellow at the back on both photos, I think. Can you fix this sort of thing by processing on the computer when you don’t have Photoshop (I only have Picasa and PhotoPlus)?
Exposure Program: Program AE
ISO Speed: 100
Exposure: 0.008 sec (1/125)
Aperture: f/7.1
Metering Mode: Center-weighted average
White Balance: Daylight
Exposure Program: Aperture-priority AE
ISO Speed: 100
Exposure Bias: 0 EV
Exposure: 0.005 sec (1/200)
Aperture: f/5.0
Metering Mode: Center-weighted average
White Balance: ShadeSee the whole series of pictures at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/estherlairlandesa/” onclick=”window.open(this.href);return false;Hi esther
Welcome to the site. This is one of the difficulties I find with photography as you can’t always control all the elements in a scene.
Fill flash would be the best solution for this situation if you just saw it in the street, it would ideally throw light on the two front subjects allowing you to achieve a more balanced result.If you had set up this photo shoot you could bring lights or reflectors(to bounce the ambient light back onto the front subjects).
You could try and use software to fix these shots but it would be much easier to revisit the site with your models and take the shots at a time that you can control the light. As it wasn’t your shoot this is probably not an option.
I would have tried to shorten the Depth of Field to throw the background out of focus, and tried a different shooting angle,maybe getting in much closer to the two front models and using them to frame the background model- experimenting with focus and depth of field between the 3 subjects (focus on front 2 with 3rd person out of focus, and vice versa)
C
That’s great, thanks C!! I don’t know that I could have shortened the dof with my camera by focusing on the two at the front. I don’t have any zoom lenses or telephoto or anything like that and my maximum focus length is 55mm (88mm) and the smaller f number I seem to be able to achieve is around 5.0. I did that with some close ups of the individuals (you can see them in my Flickr page). I kind of tried to do it with this photo.
but the figures at the back are only slightly out of focus. Should have gone closer to the man I guess, one problem was that they were on platforms and they were much taller than me.
I should have thought about using the fill-in flash, but I was a bit self conscious as I was being filmed! Also, I don’t have an external flash so I don’t think it would have made much of a difference for the wider shots. Or would it have? Must try out the flash more, I tend to not like using it…
Really appreciate you taking the time to reply to my post, thanks a mil!! :DHi Esther,
Try using your camera in manual mode (M). What camera do you have? Generally keeping ISO low (ie 100asa) unless you are going for a special grainy feel or are in very low light and don’t wish to use flash.
Manual will allow you to alter both aperture and shutter speed giving you full control over your camera’s settings. Many photographers will use Aperture priority or Shutter priority modes to select one specific setting to control depth of field or capturing a very fast moving subject and allow the camera to set the other setting for optimum exposure.
Your camera might be restricting your control if f5 is the lowest setting, getting in closer to the subject will change the distance ratio between you and the subject versus you and the background, this will give you a greater depth of field. Can you alter your focus mode to spot or centre? If so Half press the shoot button while focusing on the subject in the centre of the frame, while holding the shutter button at half-press recompose the scene as you would like to capture it and fully depress the shutter button to take the picture. (this technique can also be used for locking an exposure reading your camera manual may talk about this if your camera has this feature)
All the best
c
Thanks C, that’s great! I was using the aperture priority mode, and I had the ISO at 100, 5.0 was the lowest number I could get there for the aperture, but I havent’ yet tried the fully manual mode, haven’t got that far yet! My camera is a Canon EOS Rebel XSi/EOS 450D. I have been learning about the half-pressing the shutter button and recomposing and about locking the exposure in the course I’m doing (Improvers Course) at the Institute of Photography. For those shots I had the camera set at centre-weighted average metering. It’s just recently that I’ve been trying out the different metering settings on the camera, but I’m not clear on what they do, haven’t learned about that in the course yet. I must try taking the same shot using all the different settings to see what happens. Thanks a mil for all the tips, I appreciate the time you’ve taken to do this!! :D
Free GIMP is every bit as good as Photoshop for anything I’ll ever need, just takes getting used to using it with three windows. Or you can download CIMPshop , Esther , which is the very same as Photoshop for free – except that it isn’t as regularly updated as the GIMP itself .
Thanks for that Michael, I’ll keep it in mind for the future. At the moment I’m just focusing on learning to use the camera before I go on to Photoshop or other similar software!
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