The Secret to Low-Key Images

In a low-key image, dark tones dominate the photograph. Small, bright highlights punctuate the shadow areas, creating the characteristic mood of a low-key image. The position of the light source for a typical low-key image is behind the subject or behind and off to one side, creating deep shadows.

In pre-digital days, the appropriate exposure usually centered around how far the photographer could reduce the exposure before the highlights appeared dull. Today, this approach should be avoided at all costs, especially when black velvet-like tones are your benchmark for quality.

The Camera RAW dialog box reveals this low-key image was exposed as if it were a mid-key image and exposed for the dark side in Photoshop.

Exposure for Low-Key Images

For digital photographers interested in low-key images, an SLR loaded with a fine-grain black-and-white film is a hard act to follow. The liquid smooth transitions and black velvet-like quality of dark low-key prints of yesteryear is something that digital capture is hard pressed to match.





With digital capture, the reality is that underexposure in low light produces noise and banding—steps rather than smooth transitions of tone—in abundance. The solution is surprisingly simple, however, if you shoot in the RAW format. Be generous with your exposure to the point of clipping or overexposing your highlights, and only attempt to lower the exposure of the shadows in Adobe Camera RAW.

Although the final outcome may require deep-shadow tones, first get the shadow tones away from the left-hand wall of the histogram by increasing, not

Adobe Camera RAW rescues the highlights —sometimes automatically.

decreasing, the exposure. It is vitally important, however, not to increase the exposure so far that you lose or clip highlight detail. The original exposure of the image used in this project reveals that the shadow tones, visible as the highest peaks in the histogram, have been generously exposed in-camera, so that noise and banding have been avoided. The tones have moved well to the right in the histogram.

The highlights, however, look as though they have become clipped or overexposed. The feedback from the histogram on the camera’s LCD would have confirmed clipping at the time of exposure—the tall peak on the extreme right-hand side of the histogram—and if you had your camera set to warn you of overexposure, the highlights would have flashed to advise you of your faulty exposure settings. Adobe Camera RAW can recover at least one stop of extra highlight information when the Exposure slider is dragged to the left.

Exposing Right

With some attention to the histogram during the capture stage, you can master the art of pushing your highlights to the edge. So, if your model is not in a hurry (mine is watching a half-hour TV show), take an initial exposure on Auto, then check your camera for overexposure. Increase the exposure using the exposure compensation dial on the camera until you see the flashing highlights. When the flashing highlights start to appear, you can still add about one extra stop to the exposure before the highlights can no longer be recovered in Adobe Camera RAW.

Performance Tip

If the highlights are flashing and the shadows are still banked up against the left-hand wall of the histogram, increase the amount of fill light, i.e., reduce the difference in brightness between the main light source and the fill light. If flash is the source of your fill light, drop the power of the flash by at least two stops and choose the ‘Slow-Sync’ setting—a camera flash setting that balances the ambient light exposure and flash exposure—so the flash light doesn’t overpower the main light source positioned behind your subject.

Before massaging the tones to create a low-key image, check that the tones are smooth and free from color and luminance noise. Zoom in to 100 percent magnification for an accurate preview and look for any problems in the smooth, dark-toned areas. Set the Luminance Smoothing and Color Noise Reduction sliders to 25 to remove the noise. I also recommend that the Sharpness slider be set to 0 at this point. Selective sharpening in the main editing space helps keep the tones as smooth as possible, rather than committing to global sharpening in the Adobe Camera RAW dialog box.

Create the low-key look by dropping the Exposure and/or the Brightness sliders in the Adjust tab. You can continue to drop these sliders until the highlights start to move away from the right-hand wall of the histogram. Select the ‘White Balance tool’ and move your cursor over the deeper shadows. This will give you an idea of the RGB values you are likely to get when this image is opened into the editing space. Once you approach an average of 15 to 20 in all three channels, you should have the low-key look you’re after.

To enhance this image further, I added a vignette using the Adobe Camera RAW dialog box in Photoshop CS2. To drop the RGB to B&W, I used a technique that extracts the luminance values from the RGB file and usually gives a superior result to lowering the saturation or choosing the Remove color command.

All your work will be for naught if the printer or surface quality of the paper cannot handle these smooth, dark tones. If printed well, the print will stand up to really close scrutiny at close range.

How to develop a photographic memory without even trying

In the 1880s inventor George Eastman hit upon an ingenious idea for making photographic film flexible so it could be stored in compact canisters instead of on heavy, fragile glass plates. The new film was portable enough to allow photographers to mail it to a developer and have their pictures sent back in a matter of days. Eastman built a camera around this new technology—the Kodak—and an entire industry was born.



Eastman’s story is a classic example of the way declining costs can have radical effects on the way people use technology. Before his innovation, photography was a cumbersome and expensive process best suited to solemn official portraits. The Kodak made it possible for ordinary Americans to take snapshots at a reasonable cost, and so a whole host of everyday situations became fodder for amateur photographers: a child’s birthday party, a trip to the beach, a vacation.

We’re going through a comparable revolution thanks to the proliferation of cheap devices for snapping digital photographs, coupled with the near-infinite storage of the latest personal computers. Today the costs of taking a photograph of medium quality are rapidly approaching zero (that assumes you keep your photos digital—you’re paying at least $3,000 a gallon for the inks you use in a photo printer, and the paper that digital photos are printed on costs more than conventional photo papers). Many cell phones now come with integrated digital cameras that let you upload your photographs to your PC or your Web site with a simple click. If you want to take print-quality photos, you still need a stand-alone camera with a real lens. But if you’re just trying to capture a passing scene, the camera phones do the job—and they’re getting better with each new generation of phones.

The Kodak paradigm suggests that a radical decrease in cost will lead to a transformation in usage, and that’s exactly what we’re starting to see. Many amateur digital photographers are choosing to capture parts of their lives that wouldn’t have interested the Brownie and Instamatic generations. They take pictures of their breakfasts. They take pictures of their subway commute into work. They take pictures of a dreary office meeting that’s gone on too long. And they take way too many pictures of their cats. If the first revolution in photography was the change in subject matter, from formal events to special events, with the Kodak crowd taking pictures of times they wanted to remember, the cell phone crowd uses photography to celebrate the banal and the quotidian—they take pictures of events they want to forget.

Digital shooters also want relatives, friends, and even complete strangers to share their everyday experiences. Visit the public user pages at the photo-sharing site Flickr—purchased by Yahoo last year—and you’ll find massive archives of publicly shared photo albums, called photoblogs. Some of the albums include photos of weddings, graduations, and vacations, but others document the stray and decidedly nonphotogenic details of daily life, such as someone brushing his teeth in the morning or staring out the window of a commuter bus. Because Flickr photobloggers like to add descriptive tags to their snapshots, you can browse through images that involve “shaving” or “squirrels” or “orange juice.”

For someone raised in the Kodak era, taking photographs with no scenic or sentimental value seems like a form of madness. But photobloggers are trying to capture a life, with its inevitable mix of tedium, ritual, and rare flashes of excitement. Flickr photoblogs are close in spirit to diaries. When you look at a traditional family photo album, you get a skewed sense of what that family’s real life is like. (“You guys sure spend a lot of time standing around smiling in front of waterfalls.”) By contrast, if you sift through a photoblog, you get an immediate, visceral impression of daily routines, with little posing, few forced smiles, and hardly any waterfalls. Each such digital picture may be worth less—they’re not terribly pretty to look at—but a collection might well be of value.

Photoblogs are not purely extroverted. It’s nice to be able to share your cat pictures with perfect strangers, but it’s arguably more valuable to create a visual diary as an extension of your own memory. Inspect a Polaroid that you took of your college dorm room, for example, and you’ll inevitably find dozens of stray details about your life as a 20-year-old that you’d long ago forgotten. Likewise, even low-resolution camera phone pictures can be worth a thousand words. It takes time to jot down a paragraph or two describing your day at the office, but it takes only a few seconds to snap a few images. And because visual memory is so powerfully associative, when you see these images 10 or 20 years from now, it’s likely that a whole host of other memories from that day will come rushing back. Perhaps not as many memories as you would have if you dutifully wrote out diary entries Samuel Pepys–style each night, but who has that kind of time anymore?

Digital cameras are leading the way toward a passive diary keeping, in which common forms of personal technology churn along in the background. For example, I save all my e-mail messages—there are 13,023 messages in my in-box as of this morning—and hence have a passive diary tracking many of my most important conversations over the past four or five years, along with a shocking amount of spam. Reading through some of those old messages gives a remarkably vivid account of what my life was like back then: my obsessions and worries and small triumphs. And yet I didn’t need to spend a second thinking about creating this archive for posterity’s sake. I just carried on my normal e-mail business, and my computer took care of the archiving.

The cell phone manufacturer Nokia recently introduced a new software package for camera phones and Windows PCs called Lifeblog, which combines e-mail and the passive diary mode of the photoblog in one artful package. In essence, Lifeblog records a timeline of all the events that flow through your cell phone’s memory. Schedule an appointment, and Lifeblog will put it on the timeline; take a picture, and Lifeblog will archive it; get an instant message from a friend, send an e-mail, or retrieve a voice-mail message—Lifeblog will store it away in its running account of your digital life. When you sync your phone with your PC, you can launch the Lifeblog program and see a rendered account of your time—a long thread of information, woven together with images you’ve captured along the way.

The premise behind Lifeblog is not a new one: A number of computer visionaries, including Gordon Bell of Microsoft, have proposed software interfaces organized fundamentally around time, as a way of augmenting memory. Bell’s experimental project, called MyLifeBits, chronicles the entire flow of information through his life—everything from articles and books to phone calls and home movies. That kind of data storage might seem overly ambitious if you prefer to spend your time living your life and not archiving it. But the beauty of Lifeblog’s orientation around the cell phone and the camera is that it lets you record life away from the PC screen, without actively thinking about the archival process.

Skeptics should be reminded of the scene in Madonna’s self-obsessed documentary, Truth or Dare, in which she takes along an entire film crew—and her then boyfriend Warren Beatty—to her appointment with a throat doctor. As the cameras record the physician peering down at Madonna’s tonsils, Beatty says derisively from the shadows: “She doesn’t want to live off camera, much less talk. There’s nothing to say off camera. Why would you say something if it’s off camera? There’s no point in existing.” In Madonna’s case there were genuine costs—both of convenience and expense—associated with lugging a whole film crew around, so Beatty’s derision made sense. But in the near-zero-cost world of Flickr and Lifeblog, it’s easier to justify keeping a visual diary of our ordinary days. We do it because we like to remember.

Affordable Macro Photography

Macro! It sounds small and expensive, how do I get started and what are the options available?

There are a few budget zooms with "macro" capabilities ranging from 28-80 zoom to 70-300mm zoom with 1:2 and 1:3 macro-focussing capabilities. They are a fraction of the cost of "real" macro lenses, but generally not durable and the quality is not always great. Nikon introduced their 80-180 macro zoom, but it is expensive! The prime macro fast lenses of 50 to 200mm ranges are excellent, but they are expensive and only give 1:1 reproduction. There are other affordable options as well - like close focussing optics that screw in to your standard lens, extension tubes (hollow tubes that increase close focussing capability of any lens), bellows (the same principle as extension tubes), reverse rings for your standard lens and converters to a certain extent. The good news is that you can use any combination of the above. The drawback of close-up optical filters and reverse rings is that you can only use it for lenses with that specific diameter screw mount. Extension tubes, bellows and converters can be used with the full range of your existing lens collection. I like combinations of converters, extension tubes, macro lenses and close focussing filters because I want far more than 1:1 reproduction. I like to fill the frame with something that is only a few mm in size. The simple rule is that the more glass you add the more quality and light will be lost. You'll have to decide what magnification you need. Examples: A standard 50mm lens with a 50mm extension tube will give you 1:1 reproduction at the fraction of the cost of a 50mm macro lens. If you add a X2 converter you'll get 2,5 times the magnification.

The possibilities and combinations are numerous. You can use this with the most basic SLR to the most auto-everything SLR. You'll have to use your advanced SLR in more basic modes. You'll lose autofocus, lens to camera information and most of your advance flash functions. The good news is that you do not need any of it. If you insist on keeping all the frills on your camera, your best bet is a prime macro lens. There are +1 to +6 diopter filters for your macro lens and auto- extension tube sets if you want to do more than X1 magnification. The rest of the tutorial will concentrate on manual approach for more than X1 magnification. Magnification: Standard 50mm at 0,5m focus setting on the lens and the following extension tube combinations.

* 12mm extension tube => about 0,35 magnification
* 20 mm extension tube => about 0.5 magnification
* 36 mm extension tube => about 0.83 magnification

You can use combinations of above. For example 12mm + 20mm + 36mm with a standard 50mm lens would result in about 1,5X magnification. Now if you add a X2 converter you'll end up with a more than X3 magnification and should be able to focus down to 4-5cm distance between lens and subject. Aperture: DOF is very limited when doing macro and DOF preview button is essential (also powerful light so that you can see). You'll create a few artistic exposures with shallow DOF, but for the most part you'll need f-stops of 8-16 for most X1 magnifications. When doing X2- X4 magnification exposures this increase up to f 16-64. (Maybe one of the only virtues of converters). Shutter speed: With the F-stop range as discussed, it is obvious that it is going to be very slow even with faster films. For stationary studio work this does not matter and I like to use natural daylight and reflectors with or without fill flash. You can use shutter speeds as slow as you like with your tripod and cable release. If it gets down to the 1-20sec range you can even do a bit of light painting on the subject. You'll still have to compensate for some light loss and reciprocal failure. It will differ for different lens combinations and you'll have to do a few test exposures. An easy solution is bracketing in the positive range of the exposure. If your fancy is mobile subjects, then you'll need to use flash to freeze the action. Flash: For moving subjects your >1/1000 flash duration would stop most action. Different cameras dictate different flash synchronisation speeds, and you can use any shutter speed below that. TTL flash: If you use TTL exposure, you'll still have to compensate for some light loss. You'll have to make a flash bracket that allows for off camera flash placement close to your subject.

If you use TTL flash, set your camera on spot or centre-weighted metering and compensate for some light loss with converters and extension tubes. TTL flash in high magnification photography often results in under exposure. Magnification of 1:1 and less does not require much, if any compensation. They also recommend the use of softboxes or diffusers with close up photography. This creates a few problems with high magnification photography. The first is that your flash to subject distance is usually a few cm with high magnification photography (see manual flash use). The second problem is that your close up lens arrangement is very prone to flare. The fun thing about photography is that even though you know disaster is pending, try it anyway. Manual flash: Is the GN number of your flash true or fiction from the manufacturer? You can test this by exposing 100 ISO film with a standard lens and your flash on manual, and check if the GN number is as indicated with the following formula: Flash guide no = aperture X flash to subject distance. Example:

GN of 16 with 100 ISO film will give a spot on exposure at 2m and f8.
This also dictates a GN 11 for ISO 50 film and a GN of 22 for an ISO200 film.

The problem is that every addition of converters and extension tubes will result in progressive light loss and you'll have to make test exposures for each combo that you use. Start by what you think the exposure should be and bracket in half stops up. Once you know how much light loss each combination costs you in stops, write it down and you are set for fun. My memory is short and I misplace most things that I write down, so I guess my light loss most of the time. Converters will increase your f stop by the factor of conversion. Each 1mm of extension tubes correlates with an exposure factor of about 0,1. Example:

A 20 mm extension tube correlates with an exposure factor of about 2, or opening up 1 stop.

If you use TTL you can add 0.15 times the magnification for compensation. This is just a rough guide that I use for my Nikon set-up and I am not sure if it would be applicable for other systems. The bottom line is do not give up and make test exposures and get to know your equipment. Focussing: Decide what magnification you need and set-up your simplest lens arrangement at the minimum focussing distance. Focus is achieved by varying the camera to subject distance. There is no room for autofocus in high magnification photography. A few mm movement is all that is needed. You can appreciate the problem of finding a fast moving bug in the viewfinder, let alone keeping up with it and focussing on it. Sorry this got a bit out of hand and should solve problems with insomnia if you got this far without falling asleep. I wrote this mostly from memory and personal experience. Feel free to question and disagree as I usually make mistakes. I could continue this with specific examples of problems of macro shots and how to avoid it. Feedback would be appreciated, as I would like to avoid boring you to death. My apologies if some does not make sense, but English is a second language.

Calculating Exposure Compensations, Some useful additions

The basic idea is that, once you have figured out your image magnification (more about that later), the exposure factor E can be computed as follows:

M = magnification
E = (M + 1)(M + 1) = (M + 1)square

The table gives some examples. The first column gives the magnification M, and the second column gives the corresponding exposure factor. By multiplying a given shutter time with the exposure factor, you obtain the shutter time you have to use in order to compensate for the loss of light. The third column gives an example. If normally (in the given light situation) you would use 1/1000 as shutter time, with a M of 0.4 you have to double the exposure time to 1/500.

M (M+1)² 1/1000 : (M+1) f/8 : stops 0.1 1.21 826 1.10 8.8 0.3 0.2 1.44 694 1.20 9.6 0.5 0.3 1.69 592 1.30 10.4 0.8 0.4 1.96 510 1.40 11.2 1.0 0.5 2.25 444 1.50 12.0 1.2 0.6 2.56 391 1.60 12.8 1.4 0.7 2.89 346 1.70 13.6 1.5 0.8 3.24 309 1.80 14.4 1.7 0.9 3.61 277 1.90 15.2 1.9 1 4.00 250 2.00 16.0 2.0 1.1 4.41 227 2.10 16.8 2.1 1.2 4.84 207 2.20 17.6 2.3 1.3 5.29 189 2.30 18.4 2.4 1.4 5.76 174 2.40 19.2 2.5 1.5 6.25 160 2.50 20.0 2.6 1.6 6.76 148 2.60 20.8 2.8 1.7 7.29 137 2.70 21.6 2.9 1.8 7.84 128 2.80 22.4 3.0 1.9 8.41 119 2.90 23.2 3.1 2 9.00 111 3.00 24.0 3.2

This is all very useful when you are working with available light, but it becomes somewhat cumbersome when you want to use a flash, and you don't have a TTL-flash mode on your camera, or for one reason or another don't want to use the TTL-flash.

When using flash light as the primary source of light, shutter time has no role whatso-ever (provided you stay below or at the synchronisation time). With flash light, we are first and foremost interested in apertures, and we have to compensate the light loss by changing the aperture value and/or changing the power/distance of the flash.

Of course, to return to the example, if working with a M=0.4 implies that 1/1000 becomes 1/500, we can deduce that M=0.4 needs a compensation of one stop (either by halving the shutter time, or by opening the aperture one value).

However, this can be done in a more straightforward way. In the fourth column of the table, we calculate (M + 1) instead of (M + 1)(M + 1).

Now, that is convenient. By multiplying the working aperture value (as indicated on our objective), say f/8, with (M+1), we obtain the effective aperture for the given magnification. The fifth column gives some examples for aperture f/8. An aperture of f/8 with a magnification of M=0.4 gives an effective aperture of f/11, basically what we could expect from the previous example.

Yet, the effective aperture values will not always be a practical solution in applied work. Better objectives may allow you to choose the aperture in ½ or even 1/3 of a stop, but even then it would be far more convenient to have the relationship between magnification and exposure compensation directly in stops, instead of having to decide whether a value such as 18.4 is closer to f/16 + 1/3, or is closer to f/16 + 2/3.

Well, this can done. The next graph gives the exposure compensation in stops for magnifications between 0.1 and 10. This is definitely more convenient : at a M equal to 10, the exposure factor is (10+1)(10+1)=121, obliging you to do some mental calculations when you actually only wanted to make pictures. In my opinion, it is much more easy to know you have to compensate for 7 stops in that case. It is also a much more general approach, since it allows you to compensate either by reducing time or by opening the aperture, whatever comes in handy.

In order to use these graphs, it is not necessarily to know how they are obtained, so feel free to skip the next section. However, for those, like me, who don’t accept without (some) understanding, here is how I calculated them (the formulas are also convenient if you want to reproduce the graphs in your own spreadsheet).

When you look at the second column in the table, and concentrate on the bold figures, you will notice that when you loose a stop of light, the exposure factor E goes consecutively from 2 (well, 1.96) to 4, to 8. These are all powers of 2. What you get there is that the power to which you have to raise the number 2 in order to obtain the exposure factor E for a given M, is in fact the number which says how much stops you loose for that given magnification. If this number of stops is denoted as S, and using some (long forgotten ?) highschool maths, we get :

E = 2^S (2 to the power S).

log 2 (E) = S

By converting this to a more common base,

log 2 (E) = log 2 (e)* log e (E)

and some rearrangements, we get

S = (1/ln(2))*ln(E)

which can be readily introduced in most spreadsheet software.

How to determine the magnification M ?

In 35mm photography, the negative will be 24mm times 36mm. So if you are wondering what magnification you are working with, just hold a ruler in the position that is in focus, and count the number of mm on the ruler that are visible on your ground glass. If you only see 18 mm (with the camera and the ruler in the same horizontal position), the implication is that you have a M equal to 36/18, i.e. 2/1.

However, don’t forget that there are only a few cameras that really give you a 100% view on the ground glass. Consult your manual. If you e.g. only get a 82% view, you will have to reduce the 36mm accordingly.

Some notes about the limitations of the above formulas

The formula which states that exposure compensation is equal to (M+1)(M+1) is in fact only valid for symmetric objectives. Loosely speaking, an objective is symmetric if the aperture you see when looking to the front and looking to the back, is approximately equal. This is generally the case for normal focal distances (i.e. the neighbourhood of 50mm in 35mm-photography). This definitely is not the case with wide-angle objectives (at least if they have a retro-focus design, which is most of the time).

If the objective is not symmetric, one has to take into account the pupillary magnification, and the formula for exposure compensation is then as follows :

E = (1 + (M/P)) square

where P is the ratio of the (diameter of the) exit pupil over the (diameter of the) entrance pupil. What does this mean ? With a symmetric objective, the exit and the entrance pupil will by and large be the same, implying that P is approximately equal to one. M divided by one remains M, so the P-factor can be discarded.

If however I make a visual inspection of my 28mm wide angle objective, I can see that the entrance pupil (the side of the object) is markedly smaller than the exit pupil (the image side) (note that the P-ratio is independent of the aperture value chosen). I « guestimate » that the ratio is something like 2/1.


At first sight this seems promising, since dividing M by a P equal to 2 will substantially reduce the exposure factor, suggesting that the high magnifications you can obtain with a wide angle 28mm objective (e.g. M=5 with « only » 14 cm bellows extension) won’t become too dark, relatively speaking.

Until you realise that in such a set-up, you have to reverse your wide angle, thereby reversing exit and entrance pupil. For a M equal to 5, this will give an E equal to (1+10)(1+10)=121, which, as we saw a few minutes ago, corresponds with the exposure factor that in a symmetric objective only occurs at a M of 10.

I have to admit that I have never used a wide angle on bellows, so my conclusion is entirely based on what I « read » in the formula. If someone could corroborate the conclusion on the basis of personal experience, that would be very nice.

In the end, notwithstanding all these nice formulas, it will always remain necessary to do your own tests with your personal material. At least the formulas will give you a clue as to where to start, so you don’t have to start in complete darkness.

Shooting Fireworks Photography - Digitally

Most of it is obvious stuff, but can be forgotten when the day arrives and you grab your camera, thinking you have everything covered, and dash out the door. Some, may not have thought much about any of this and hopefully may benefit from this article. Above all, before the 4th of July comes around, I strongly recommend that you practice some night photography before hand and not on the day in question. Consider it a dry run for what's in store for you. If something is going to go wrong, you at least will be prepared come the day of the fireworks.

1. Location: Before you can even think about shooting fireworks, you need a nice location to shoot from. This is key to shooting any night life, especially when it comes to fireworks. For example, if you try to take photos of fireworks from your back yard, how many objects may get in the way or become part of the photo? Trees, other houses, chimney's, etc. could all show up in your fireworks photos and could distract from the main subject, the fireworks, leaving you with some ugly snapshots. Climbing up on your roof or to a hill high above the city life can prove advantageous, as most of the objects on ground level would no longer pose an issue. Of course, I'm not saying that all objects are bad. A nice object would be to have a statue, monument, famous hill or mountain, etc. in the photo along with the fireworks to add extra content to the photo.

Scout out your location a few days, or weeks in advance. Some places are sealed off when it comes time to shoot fireworks. Some people don't like everyone flocking to their property and parking or hanging out and littering. For those that try to get as close as possible, they may seal off the access roads leading up to where the fireworks are going to be executed from for safety reasons. A prime location to shoot fireworks would be a place close enough to the fireworks, away from crowds and artificial lighting. Having to shoot within a crowd of people isn't something I would recommend. You'd have to be on guard for those walking by who might trip or bump into your tripod. Also, the less people, the less you'll have to worry about people pulling up in a car with their headlights shining right into your lens and overexposing your shot. Flashlights and someone lighting up a cigarette could also do the same. The list of why not to film night photography in a crowd could go on and on.

2. Arrive early to your destination: There's nothing worse than arriving after dusk to your perfect spot, only to find that your place is a real hot spot for crowds. In this particular scenario, you might have a backup location because you took the time to scout around before hand. So, if you arrived early only to find a hundred people sitting around waiting, you could check out your secondary spot. Arriving early will also help you find an unobstructed view of the fireworks and allow yourself to get setup where you want, before anyone else can take your spot.

3. What to bring? You'll need your camera of course. You'll also need a tripod, cable release or remote control, plenty of media/compact flash cards, a fully charged camera battery (bring more than one if you have them or consider at least buying a second one), and a flashlight to help you shoot in the darkness.

4. What to avoid? First and foremost, is artificial lighting. The less lighting around, the better. You are going to be shooting time elapsed photos and you need all the darkness you can, as you want to be the one controlling the light for the fireworks and not your surroundings. If there is already too much artificial lighting around you when you start taking photos, your shutter won't be open as long or everything may be washed out/over exposed. Try to stay away from street lights, cars passing by, etc. If you are shooting from your back yard, try turning off the lights in your house.

The second thing to avoid, as I already mentioned, is a crowd of people. This may be a personal choice, but personally, I'd rather be concentrating on the fireworks and the photography than the people around me.

5. Camera settings: When it comes time to shoot the fireworks, you need to set up your camera to get the best picture. The first setting you can use is landscape mode. This is normally depicted as a mountain range on your camera mode dial. By using this setting, you won't have to worry about focusing issues.

The other setting which is probably the most preferred, is the "B" (bulb) setting. By using the bulb setting, you can control how long your shutter will remain open. How long it remains open comes into play with the aperture settings. With the bulb setting, this is where your cable release or remote control comes in to play. Once your camera is on the bulb setting, you simply open up the shutter by using your cable release or remote control and then lock it or hold it down. In the case of fireworks, you'll probably just want to hold it for anywhere from one to four seconds, vice locking it. The exposures aren't going to be longer than that and locking it will be pointless, since you'll spend half the night locking and unlocking. Just hold it and count off the seconds. The exposure range should be around 1 second, generally. 1 to 4 seconds should be pretty general for everyone. It will vary depending on your location to the fireworks and how much light is coming into your frame. One second would be my choice for the first shot. Once you've snapped off a couple of shots, you'll realize that fireworks photography isn't rocket science (no pun intended). If the photo is too dark, then hold your shutter open for another second. If it's too bright, you held it open too long.

6. Aperture & ISO settings: I always shoot on ISO 100, especially when it comes to night photography. Therefore, my aperture range will be from F/8 to F/16. If you shoot on a higher setting, such as ISO 200, then your aperture range will be around F/11 to F/22 and so on. Keep in mind that the higher the ISO, with most photography, the more grainy photos will appear. Although with this type of subject, you generally don't have to worry too much about graininess, provided you stay below 400. Lower is always better. Some of you might be tempted to use a wider aperture because you're concentrating on the dark sky. Your goal is to shoot the fireworks, not the dark sky. Once the fireworks explode, you'll have plenty of light.

7. High Quality: You'll want to set your digital camera to take the highest quality photo. This allows you to reduce the amount of compression that the camera will make to its images. I always have my camera set on high quality. There are times where I probably don't need the quality, but having it set on this for night photography is even more critical to me. I want the highest quality photo when it comes to night photography and I don't want to introduce compression noise (blocks of colors instead of being smooth). There is nothing worse that seeing a photo of lights in a blocky formatted fashion. It's just a horrible looking picture.. Well, there is one thing that's worse and that's a camera that isn't steady, which brings me to my next topic - tripod.

8. Tripod: Night photography is when you need the camera to be totally still. Any movement of the camera during a time elapsed photo and the photo is almost a guaranteed flop. This is where the tripod comes in and it's a must. If you don't have a tripod or your camera doesn't have a tripod thread, all is not lost. Try placing your camera on a platform. This can range from the top of your car, a wall, fence or even a railing. If you have some time, visit a local camera store and see if they have a small bean bag you can place your camera on. The bean bag will provide support as well as allow you to position the camera at the angle you need it to be to shoot the fireworks display.

9. Lens choice: This all depends on how close or far away you are from the fireworks display. If you are close up, you'll probably want to use a wide angle lens. If you are too far away from the fireworks because of all the crowds and what not, you'll probably want to use something with a longer focal length. In either case, you'll want to frame your image so that it includes the trail of the fireworks as well as give you some dark sky around the blast of the firework when it explodes. Using this theory, should give you a basis of what lens to utilize. Also, make sure you remove any polarizer filters from your lens before you start shooting.

9. Shooting the fireworks: You should have already experimented with shooting at night before the day of the fireworks and your camera needs to be mounted on a tripod. If you don't have a cable release or a remote control to keep the shutter open, you'll need to be as still as possible as long as your finger is on the camera. That being said, your first few photos of the actual fireworks is still going to require some experimenting, although not that much. You already know how to set your camera up. The experimentation is going to be positioning the camera on the first firework display. You really shouldn't have to adjust too much after the first firework display. The second firework display is where you will have to experiment with how long of an exposure to do. My suggestion, as I already stated, is 1 second. This first photo should tell you a lot. If it's too dark, well, that's an easy one. Hold the shutter open a little longer. But what if it looks nice to you? Take a closer look at the way the fireworks look in your camera. Does the white of the fireworks seem just a little too bright? Chances are, it might be. You may never notice it until you go back to the digital darkroom. If your camera allows you to zoom in on a photo you've already taken, zoom in and take a closer look to see if the colors are washed out. If they are, you might want to not expose the next frame as much. Try backing off half or even just a quarter of a second less.

Ok, let's say the fireworks look fine at 1.5 seconds. Do we keep shooting at the same amount of timed exposure? Maybe. If the last fireworks photo looked great, does that mean the next one will too? Chances are, it probably won't be off by too much. If the last firework photo was dark blue in color, will the same amount of exposure come out just the same on a bright white firework? Probably not because it's brighter and you'll need to back off on the exposure a little. I'm just throwing some questions out to get you to think a little bit about setting up the shot and to drive home that it's not an exact science. After about 10 or so shots, you should have it in your mind that dark colored fireworks may require an additional half second of exposure than a bright white firework. Mileage will vary of course. How close you are shooting to the fireworks (focal length) is a factor. If you are really close to the blast (focal length), then you won't have as long as an exposure. If you are wanting to get more than one blast in the photo, obviously your shutter will have to remain open longer to expose two or more blasts. In this case, you may have an exposure that is 10 seconds. As long as you are shooting nothing but darkness in between the fireworks, you really won't have to worry too much about over exposing your shot.

10. When do I snap the picture? If you are doing a close-up shot of the explosion, you'll want to snap the picture off just before it explodes and then release the shutter when the firework is ending. If you are close enough to hear the blast of the mortar, then you might want to open up the shutter at that precise moment. After it explodes and the light disappears, then close the shutter. (Keep in mind that after you release the shutter, that your digital camera will need a second or two to write to the flash card. You may end up skipping every other firework, depending on how long your camera takes to process an image and how fast they are shooting the fireworks.)

Don't forget to continue experimenting. Try changing the position of your camera and taking vertical photos as well. This may get you some awesome shots of the firework trails as they are blasted up to the sky and when they explode. If all of this is basic stuff so far, try experimenting with a zoom lens. When the explosion goes off, zoom in on the fireworks. The result will get a photo of a firework looking like it's exploding directly towards your camera.

Selective Focus

Photographers love accessories that help them create unique-looking images. With many photographers owning the same cameras and lenses, it’s exciting to find a product that provides us with the ability to create a distinctive photograph. The Lensbaby 2.0 gives photographers the flexibility to explore our individual creativity.

The Lensbaby 2.0 is a lens with a flexible barrel that, when pushed, pulled and/or bent, creates a dynamic-looking image with a relatively narrow plane of focus. You can create effects similar to those of a Lensbaby using Photoshop, but that takes you longer as you plow through various layers of filtering. A distinct advantage to Lensbabies is that you can experiment on location because you see the resulting distortion effect in your viewfinder.

The effect that a Lensbaby achieves is called selective focus, whereby a selected part of your image is in focus and the balance is less so. When we look at pictures, our automatic brain (as my university professor called it; not the technical term, I’m sure) searches for items that are familiar, comfortable and easy to understand. This causes us to quickly scan an image, searching for anything sharp and understandable. If nothing in the image is in focus, we eventually realize that the intent may be abstract, step back and evaluate.

The Lensbaby 2.0 lets you take advantage of the brain’s search for something sharp by providing you with complete control over the plane of focus, which is normally only available with large-format view cameras or expensive tilt-shift lenses.

A Lensbaby comes with a series of magnetic aperture rings (ƒ/2.0, ƒ/4.0, ƒ/5.6 and ƒ/8), which simply drop into the front of the lens; these aperture rings control depth of field. To focus a Lensbaby, use your fingers to compress the lens toward you or push the lens away from you. By pulling it toward you, the Lensbaby focuses to infinity; push it away from you and it focuses up to a foot away.

Why Stock Photography is a Great Resource for Web Business

A picture is worth a thousand words.

And it still is today. With the media changing everyday photography has changed along with it and as a result is still a valuable resource for web business.

1. Photos enhance the look of a website.

2. Communicate so much more than words, they communicate emotions.

3. Photos can be customized for borders and backgrounds.

4. Photos have more impact than clip art. (They tend to give a more professional look.)

5. Stock photography is a big business and affordable stock is out there.

As a web business you’re most likely a small business and have a limited budget and that’s where stock photography can be great resource for you. You can spend as little as $10.00 or as much as $200.00 plus on one image. (Consider that if you hired a professional commercial photographer to shoot a few rolls of film to your specifications it would cost you thousands and thousands of dollars.)

Things to remember when shopping for stock photography:

1. Know what you want, start with a generic idea and get specific as you shop (Remember you probably will not find the exact image that you have in your head, be open to good photos that you find along the way.)

2. Shop around, try the larger agencies try the independents too. (Larger agencies offer more to chose from independent photographers offer more personalized service.)

3. Know what you’re going to use it for, stock photography belongs to the photographer who created it, or the agency, so know what you need it for there can and will be limitations of use.

4. Know what format you need, you only need 72 dpi for the web, be careful that you don’t pay for a higher quality when you don’t need it. (300 dpi for printing purposes)

5. Know your terms for the industry, Make sure that you know what the difference is between royalty free and rights managed, and any other terms the business may use. If something is not clear on their site contact them and ask for clarification.

So remember you can add a little more impact and emotion to your site by making use of the stock photography out there today.