ELEMENTS OF BUILDING GREAT OUTDOOR PORTRAITS THE SERIES - #1

The First Step--Finding locations.

I put this first because it's the most important.  If you choose wrong here you've failed before you've even begun!

This is my foundation:  I BUILD THE PORTRAIT FROM THE BACKGROUND--->FORWARD.  The background is so important to me that it trumps a perfect lighting pattern on my subjects.  Sure,  perfect lighting may get you print Merits in international competition--I've had LOTS of those--but a nicely posed family outside with a beautiful background SELLS large wall prints!  We call those Green Merits.

To begin with, I'm ALWAYS looking for potential new locations.  In my daily drives I'll mentally note some spot,  as I drive by, to return at the time I usually do portraits.

        HERE'S WHAT I'M LOOKING FOR:

#1.  TREES that are on the EDGE or perimeter of a park (grass is the best base to seat people).

#2.   Rustic sites on farms or ranches or historic locations (maybe with a barn or farm equipment--again, to seat people--or with old cars,  trucks, or old hay wagons).

#3.   I also look at the "common areas" in big housing developments--they often have nice lawns and many, around me here in Idaho,  have great waterfalls!

         HERE'S MY PROCEDURE:
        
#1.   I go out about 2-hours before sunset to WALK the site. You can't just drive by you need to get into the location!

#2.   I approach from the EAST so I'm LOOKING WEST towards where the sun will be setting.

#3.   I'm looking for GLOWING LEAVES being back-lit by the sun.  If there's no glow happening you may be out too early or the tree foliage may be too dense.  If the foliage is too dense I don't use the area because without back-light I'm going to have a DEAD BACKGROUND.  I want my background to be glowing with light--I WANT IT ALIVE!  That creates depth and visual interest.

#4.   Next I pretend I'm the subject and turn my back to the background and LOOK RIGHT AND LEFT. Ideally I want to see a LARGE PATCH of SKY on one side and some more TREES on the other (to block the ambient light on that side creating some dimensional shading on my subjects' faces).  If I also have a nice place to seat my subjects--like grass or some rocks--even better!

Finding this back-lit background has other benefits.  In addition to giving you a beautiful setting the back-light creates a nice separation of your subjects from the background and if the timing is right you may also get a nice hair-light on your subjects as well!

Here are some examples, of what I look for, at some of my favorite locations:

 F7.1 @ 1/125 sec. ISO 400  Lens at 112mm

I placed this family at my favorite location for larger groups.  There is a big tree and that's in the picture getting nice back-light plus several trees near it providing the GOBO effect (blocking light) creating nice shadows on my subjects and a BIG patch of sky on the right. I even got a nice hair light on them from the back-light!   This is the IDEAL set of conditions for TRUE NATURAL LIGHT PORTRAITURE.

F5.6 @ 1/250 sec. ISO 400  Lens at 175mm

This little park has no useful trees and is very open but does have some good backgrounds about an hour before sunset.  So, to put these kids against the back-lit background I wanted I sat them on a picnic table!  Then I backed-off as far as I could to use the longest focal length possible AND used a little wider aperture, than I normally do for small groups, thus creating a nice de-focused background. The lighting's not ideal but the background is great and I got a hair light on them as well.

As usual, don't hesitate to ask questions...I'm here to help.

Author:  Jerry W. Venz, PPA Master Photographer Certified - http://www.LightAtTheEdge.com

SENIOR SESSIONS: A BOY AND HIS TOYS !

Austin had recently purchased a big nasty, Suzuki, GSXR, sport bike as his first ever motorcycle, no less, so I wanted to get them photographed together before either of them ended-up in intensive care!  He also wanted to be photographed with his project car, that he turbocharged for drag racing, and his pit bull, so I scheduled a separate session for those.

LESSONS LEARNED FROM AN OLD PRO.:  Don't try to do too much on a given session. Your results will be much better when you focus on ONE photographic goal at a time.

Going out of my comfort zone, due to his schedule, I had to do this session starting at two P.M., which is usually NOT the best time for portraits outside.  Most of my sessions, outside, are usually done one or two hours before sunset. At least I got to choose the location at this local city park that had caught my eye.

Being dead winter the lack of color in the park actually helped to make both him and his bike really stand out. I also really liked the trees with their textures and color that unified the monochromatic setting.



In the spirit of the old saying:   When life gives you lemons….make lemonade!  The following image, using my 15mm fisheye lens, was O.K. but needed more POP so I toyed with the image in ACR boosting the Vibrance, Saturation, and Hue, until I got that dead grass into a yellow range that went well with the yellow of the bike.  This also created the more striking blue in sky making the clouds stand out more.

This is what is so fun about senior sessions--it's O.K….no it's expected that we sometimes go OVER THE TOP!

About ten days later, after he had his car detailed, we went back the same park, to photograph the more challenging subjects---the car and his dog.
In questioning him about his car (black with cool red wheels and some red graphics on the car) I suggested he wear dark colors with red accents of some kind.  That little bit of planning paid off!  He looked great and we had good color harmony!

For our last setup I moved him, for some individuals, over to this large piece of rusted machinery that was on display nearby. Very dramatic!

All of these images were taken with my 70-200mm f2.8 lens at 200mm or with my 15mm fisheye.  I like to work at the extreme ends when it comes to focal length where the look is far more dramatic and unusual---I don't use the middle focal lengths much…I don't even own a 50mm lens…BORING!

As usual if you have questions, please don't hesitate to ask...

Author:  Jerry W. Venz, PPA Certified Master Photographer Training site: http://LightattheEdge.com

So, YOU WANT TO BE A Wedding Photographer?!

So you want to photograph weddings...one of the most, if not the most technically demanding and stressful types of photography you can do.  And of course, you want to be great at it…Right?

So, then I assume you HAVE experience in ALL types of photography…Yes?

Do YOU have experience in ALL this?
 1.  Natural Light Outside
 2.  Natural Light Inside (window light)

 3.  Available light interiors with mixed color temperatures (inside church)
 4.  Interiors in low light with flash (dragging the shutter)
 5.  Lighting groups at the altar
 6.  Balancing off camera flash with on camera flash
 7.  Architectural photography interiors and exteriors.

 8.  Food photography by window light an/or flash (eg. the cake, favors, their meal & table settings). You may also have to move the cake, or the invitation, for a better lighting and placement of bride and groom when cutting.

  9.  Product photography:  the bride's dress, shoes, jewelry and accessories.

10. Action photography; eg. the bouquet and garter toss: you may have only a couple of minutes to set-up each of those events.  You have to decide where YOU place the bride in relation to her girls, so you can photography them with the best background, in addition you have to quickly train the bride how to toss the bouquet.

11. Macro photography:  extreme close-ups of their rings, properly placed or artistically set-up is a big seller.

12. Car photography (the limo) with bride & groom and/or attendants.

13. Interior car photography; you have 8 people in a 25-foot stretch limo…where are YOU going to be and how are you going to light it…you have maybe 2 minutes to do this!

14. Candid photography; what we call "Storytelling" images of everything that happens between the big events of their day.

15. Lighting and Posing a 180 LB bride (standing and sitting). Don't even think about  using on-camera flash! To make it harder, her bouquet is
only 12" wide.  Lighting and posing a 98 LB bride and Her bouquet is Wider than her hips!

16. Posing the bride and groom: she's 5 feet tall and he's 7' 3" tall!  What about that first dance!

17.  Posing a wedding party of 20 people, using a one or two step, dimly lit, church altar.  You have 5 or 6 more set-ups, working on down to the bride & groom alone, and you have 15 minutes to do it before they shut off the lights. What's your plan?

18. How you are going to orchestrate your images throughout the day? Know how to create a step by step image plan, with back-up plan (if I don't catch these images up front where can I make them up later).  

19. Know your Camera inside and out!  In a matter of moments be able to switch gears from a dark interior to bright sunlight outside.

20. Then after all of the above, you need people skills and self confidence.  Oh…my wife asked me to remind you to charge appropriately!  Average weddings use up about 40 hours of your time start to finish…how much do you want to get paid for a weeks worth of work after Cost of Goods?

Now, what do you need to accomplish any or all of the above?
The obvious…paperwork!  Contracts, pricing, studio policies, who's who information sheets, list of images to be done, and timeline to name of few.  Oh…bit of advice here…make your last payment due 2 weeks BEFORE the wedding.  If you don't you could wait a long time to collect any balance due after the wedding.

The equipment you need is:
1.  A minimum of 2 camera bodies with vertical grips, housing 2 batteries and 2 back-up batteries per camera.

2.  A Pro flash on EACH camera, with some kind of flash modifiers (at least a Stoffen type). I also carried 2 extra sets of batteries for each flashes.

3.  I brought 7 different lenses, but you can safely cover events with 4 lenses.

The must have lenses are:
1)  A Pro Medium Zoom - like: f2.8 70-200 L, IS, II Canon, or f2.8 70-200 VR Nikon, or f2.8 80-200 Nikon, or Tamron or Sigma f2.8 70-200mm.

2) A Pro Short Zoom Lens - f2.8 24-70 L Canon, or f4.0 24-105 L Canon (will do .7x Macro), or f2.8 24-70 G Nikon, or f4.0 24-120 VR Nikon

3) A Macro or a Zoom/Macro Lens - f2.8 105mm VR Nikon, or f2.8 100mm Macro Canon

4) A super wide zoom or my favorite a 15mm or 16mm Fisheye.  Every time I've used the fisheye lens clients were blown-away and bought them! Every manufacturer makes fisheye lenses.

Now ask yourself…Are You really ready to be a wedding photographer?  
If you don't have 100% of the obvious paperwork you are setting yourself up for issues down the road. If you can't do at least 90% of the skills needed to do all these types of photography, you need more training before you take responsibility for capturing a life changing event for someone. 

If you need help, give me a call and we'll see if we can get you into one of the training classes offered at our training site ( http://www.LightattheEdge.com ) that will help you the best.  As always leave your comments.

Author:  Jerry W. Venz, PPA Certified Master Photographer

Being Creative on a New Location!

Seniors session at a new location

We had just gotten our permit to do photography in the Idaho Botanical Gardens, so we used the opportunity to do a senior session there.  A single individual would allow us to move around more easily to try out more areas within the location.  Because we want to offer our seniors many different settings, change up the poses, and create a variety of looks using different lenses, this would be a great combination of subject and location.

When it comes to lens choice, I like to work at the extreme edges.  I either use the most telephoto I have (200mm - 300mm) or the widest lens I own (15mm fisheye) offering our clients a visual style many have never seen. I leave the middle focal length territory, like 50mm, to the amateurs.  The middle to me is boring--I don't live there!  The closest I got to 50mm in this session was the image at the huge rocks I did at 70mm, which was the widest I could go with my favorite portrait lens, the Canon 70-200mm f2.8.

Don't be afraid to experiment with a new location, the outer edges of your lenses and the edge of the light…You might actually like it!

As usual, ask questions…it will help you learn. 

Author:  Jerry W Venz; Certified, PPA Master Photographer

USE LENS DISTORTION FOR GOOD NOT EVIL!

All lenses distort in some way.  As you move closer, with a wide angle lens, the part of your subject that is nearest the camera becomes larger. This happens with all lenses but short lenses will amplify the effect--this is called EXTENSION DISTORTION; and it's extremely unattractive on people! (EVIL!)

Backing away from your subject reduces this effect but then the subject becomes too small in the frame. The solution is to use a telephoto lens to increase our subject's size without distorting their features in an unattractive way.

As you back-up and use a longer lens it will push your subjects into the background--this is called COMPRESSION DISTORTION. This distortion is very useful and complimentary on people! (GOOD!)

The short lens will make the background appear to recede from your subjects and simultaneously keep the background more in focus because of the inherently greater depth of field created by the short lens. Both of these effects work against us in fine portraiture.

In portraiture we use the telephoto lens to narrow our vision, to show less (which can reveal more), to knock entire backgrounds out-of-focus and thus make our subject(s) unmistakably urgent to look at. My goal in environmental portraiture is to put my subject INTO their environment and make them look good as well.  Using the telephoto lens compression effect will bind the image together not blow it apart the way a short lens does.

Where these effects are absolutely vital to control is when doing group portraiture.  Even with a small group where you have them set-up in only two rows if you use a wide lens, even at a comfortable distance, you will see an increase in head sizes and body mass in the front row and a pronounced decrease in head sizes in the back row. As professionals this is something we must control!

At this point, many of you are probably asking, "So, what is he defining as a "wide-angle" that is BAD for portraits and what is a good telephoto for portraits?"

Well, many photographers reading this will probably be surprised that I define the "nifty fifty" as a wide-angle that should be avoided as much as possible--don't even think about anything wider for anything but novelty images!  I don't even own a 50mm prime and have had no use for it in 40-years!

My go-to portrait lens is my Canon 70-200 f2.8 and prior to that it was my Nikkor 80-200 f2.8 when I had a Nikon system. Sometimes these were not enough when doing individuals of kids or high school seniors so I would add a 1.4X extender!

And what focal lengths am I using on who?  I use the MOST telephoto I can use given the environment:

For individuals: 200-300mm usually at f2.8 to f4.5
For small families: 150mm at f5.6 to f6.3
For larger families: 135mm at f6.3  to f7.1

The portraits below show vividly the effect of EXTENSION DISTORTION (using a lens at 50mm) versus the COMPRESSION DISTORTION created using my portrait zoom at 170mm.

As always should you have questions please don't hesitate to ask!

Author:  Jerry W Venz, PPA Certified Master Photographer

PHOTOGRAPHY OF CHAOTIC ACTION!

I've been reading for years that the Canon 5D MKII is NOT good for sports or action photography.  Since high speed action photography is how I learned photography in the 1970's, I decided to give my 5D MKII a real workout with some of the most difficult action to photograph--the chaotic action of rodeo!

I call rodeo chaotic action because it's action that is unplanned.  You never know where animals are going to go or what they're going to do.  That's very different than photographing racing motorcycles or race cars on a track.  I always knew from turn-to-turn, within a few feet, where a vehicle was going to be because, having been a racer myself, I knew the best "line" through each turn.

In rodeo all we have is a starting point--we know the bronc, the bull, or the calf is busting out of that gate or chute--after that they can go anywhere in the arena!
This is a real challenge for our auto focus, our framing ( constant zooming ), and exposure.

So, this was a great test of the 5D MKII's ability to auto focus while tracking action while leaving the zooming and exposure to me in manual mode.

My camera setup--using the Canon 70-200 f2.8 L IS II lens--was:

AUTO FOCUS: AI Servo ( for moving subjects when the focusing distance keeps changing )
DRIVE MODE: Continuous @ 3.9 frames per second
IMAGE QUALITY: jpeg L

I used the large jpeg because I did not want anything to slow me down; If I used RAW I could exceed my maximum burst rate and fill the buffer which would time-out the camera. Working within the camera's limitations I wanted to give it the best chance for success.

This was one of those, scary, chaotic situations where my subject charged TOWARDS ME--note the gal RUNNING FOR HER LIFE!

This one was a little more challenging for the auto focus with all the moving people in the background, but It did well.

A great action series where the auto focus tracked very well as I panned and zoomed.

A much more difficult series because I panned across a VERY BUSY background and then they changed direction, coming towards me, forcing me to zoom-out!

I think that,  working within the camera's capabilities, the 5D MKII is a fine camera for action photography--another feather in the cap for a SUPERB PORTRAIT CAMERA!

As always, if you have questions don't hesitate to ask. Asking questions is the best part of learning.

Author:  Jerry W Venz, PPA Certified Master Photographer

The Exposure Triangle - Part 3

Making sense of all that complicated photo jargon, Part 3!

Now that you’ve got a handle on shutter speeds and apertures, I’ll move on to the third side of the exposure triangle—ISO or film speed.

ISO stands for the International Standards Organization, which replaced our American Standards Association (remember when America had it’s own standards and our film speed was in ASA?), in order to make all things technical, consistent around the world. I guess the ISO is a kind of United Nations for all the anal-techno-geeks seeking conformity in all things man made.

The ISO basics are simple:  in low light you go to a higher ISO value and in bright light you use a lower ISO value if you don’t want to change your shutter speed and aperture.  The common lower ISO’s are 100 or less.  Depending on the digital camera you have a really high ISO ranges from 400 to 800, in a consumer grade camera. In the professional world we use cameras that will create stunning images at 400 ISO and up to 3200 ISO that we don’t use the lower ISO’s much for outside work.

Now that we’re bringing shutter speeds and apertures together a very important aspect to remember is that each whole shutter speed step (eg. 1/30, 1/60, 1/125 etc.) and each whole aperture step (eg. f4.0, f5.6, f8.0 etc.) are equal.  In other words moving from a shutter speed of 1/60 to 1/125 is equal in an exposure change of one-stop. It’s exactly the same exposure change as if you really did change your f-stop from say f5.6 to f8.0 (and in this example either of these changes would allow one-stop less light to reach the film or sensor).  In addition, your whole ISO steps (eg. 100, 200, 400 and so on) are also equal to a one f-stop change in exposure.  See a pattern here? And just to make things more complicated, digital cameras have shutter speeds and f-stops in between the whole numbers.  But it’s all the same—the smaller steps in between are also the same in how they affect your exposure in equivalence to each other.

So, let’s set-up exposure examples to show some equivalent exposures using different f-stops and shutter speeds.

EXAMPLE ONE: Leaving our ISO at 100, your camera meter says that the proper exposure is: aperture at f8.0 with a shutter speed of 1/250th.  What if you want to stop some fast action, at your son’s football game, so going to a faster shutter speed of 1/500 sec. would help—however, to maintain a proper exposure, since now this faster shutter speed is allowing less light to reach your film/sensor, you must change your f-stop one step, in the opposite direction to get more light, to f5.6 (remember with f-stops, the smaller the number, the bigger the opening of its aperture). As a side effect the larger aperture (f5.6) will isolate your son better because you are creating less depth-of-field at this aperture. 

To recap, you went from:  f8.0 @ 1/250 sec. to f5.6 @ 1/500 sec. This maintains the same exposure with a faster shutter speed and less depth-of-field.  You get a two-fer! Now, You’re not just making a proper exposure—you’re making creative decisions that will make the photograph more visually interesting!

EXAMPLE TWO:  The following would apply to situations where the light level stays the same.  Once a proper exposure is set-up; we will use ISO 100, f-stop of f5.6 and shutter speed at 1/125 sec. for this example.

If you change any one of these numbers you must change one of the others by the same amount, but in the opposite direction, to maintain a proper exposure.  If you go to a higher ISO like 200 you must stop down your f-stop to f8.0 and keeping the shutter speed where it was at, 1/125 sec.  OR still at the higher ISO of 200, keeping the f-stop where it was, f5.6, you must go faster on the shutter speed, to 1/250 sec. 

If the situation changes and the light level changes, say the sun is setting, so you have less light, now you only have to change one of the variables in the original set-up (any ONE!).

Now you have three choices:
1)    Higher ISO: ISO 200, same f-stop of f5.6, same shutter speed of 1/125 sec
2)    Same ISO: ISO 100, wider aperture of f4.0, same shutter speed: 1/125 sec
3)    Same ISO: ISO 100, same aperture of f5.6, slower shutter speed of 1/60 sec.

The exposure triangle is really just a way of thinking about how your shutter speed, aperture and ISO are inter-related.  You can check out some examples below.

Image 1:  Nature
Extremely fine detail and sharp Low ISO: 100 slide film
On a tripod & slow shutter speed: 1/15 sec
For maximum depth-of-field using a very small aperture: f16.0
Lens: 16mm wide-angle

 

That will wrap it up for now…till next time. Jerry

Author:  Jerry W. Venz, Published in the Eagle Informer 2011