By Peter Phun, on August 19th, 2010%
Cutting the rug– I dragged the shutter shooting at ISO 400 1/6 sec @ f2.8 and set my flash to 1/32 power.
As twilight approached, we went one deck below for our scrumptious dinner.
My choice of fish delectably decorated with a bright red pepper looked mouth-watering.
Had our waitress not warn us that the pepper was a jalapeño, all the drinks in the “Open bar” wouldn’t have been enough to quell its hotness.
By the time I finished, the late evening light was just too good to ignore.
It was also time to raise the ISO from 100 to 400 to get a shutter speed that I knew I could comfortably handhold.
Using my 580EX off-camera in manual mode, even at 1/128th power, in such close quarters required me to feather its output some more.
The built-in white diffuser card was actually kicking in too much light.
I ended up using my fingers over the flash head.
Continue reading A Wedding & Cruise on the Sacramento River 2
By Peter Phun, on July 29th, 2010%
Hadia Habibi & Al Nar Bellydancers
Working on location outdoors can simplify matters especially if you’re photographing a group.
A well-chosen location and an equally well-chosen time of the day can free you from having to set up a seamless or Muslin background if your subject is a group of more than 5 or 6 people.
You see, the problem with photographing any kind of group is deciding what to use as your background.
What lens to use? Wide angle lenses make everyone smaller, introduces a lot of clutter in the background and has too much depth-of-field. I used the 80mm setting on my 80-200 zoom. The downside? I have to step way back from the group and that means if you’re soft-spoken, you’ll need a bullhorn. The other problem? How do you position your light without it showing up in the picture? Since your light will be closer to your subjects than you are physically, that may mean using a boom to raise the lights out of the frame. I got away with moving my light just outside of the frame on the left. Marvin, my assistant, was also holding a reflector on the left to kick back the directional sunlight coming in from the right.
Unless you plan on cramming everybody so close like sardines, the bigger your group, it follows then, the more space you’ll need.
Realistically, once you have about 8 people, you’re almost assuredly out of space indoors in most studios. And even the biggest seamless paper or Muslin background hung on the long side up will not be enough.
Continue reading On location group photos
By Peter Phun, on July 28th, 2010%
Two posts back, I mentioned Eye-Fi as a possible solution for digital photographers who have a “wait problem.”
It is inevitable, we get so used to the immediate nature of digital photography.
I’m sure I’m not alone.
As soon as we are done taking pictures, we’d like for those images to get to our computers ready to edit by the time we sit down.
Not everyone using a digital camera wants to edit their pictures.
Some may just want to shoot, upload to an online sharing website.
And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
Continue reading Eye-Fi Review
By Peter Phun, on July 10th, 2010%
Think back to your 1st film camera.
You had to figure out how to load the camera, take a light reading, change the ISO to match your film speed, set it on one of the automatic modes, then click the shutter.
Then when you ran out of film, you had to reload.
Continue reading Guide to using any digital camera1
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