Shooting silhouettes

In our last post, I mentioned that we could create silhouettes in a very easy way, just by using the central spot metering mode . Now I'm gonna show you how to create this effect that can give such a distintive touch to a photograph.

What is a silhouette? A silhouette is created in the limit between an underexposed and a normally exposed area. This means that to create a silhouette we will need a source of light behind our subject that makes it darker than the rest of the scene, like in the example above.

But having that source of light won't create this effect by itself. If we use matrix metering mode (default mode) the camera will try to expose the whole image properly, spoiling the silhouette effect. What we want is the camera exposing properly for the lighter areas only, leaving the rest underexposed to create the silhouettes. To do that we will use central spot metering mode, you can read infomation in more depth in the last article, but basically you want to center the source of light in the frame and then use the AutoExposure-Lock button to tell the camera to expose properly for that lighter area. The darker zones will automatically be underexposed, creating the silhouette effect.

This technique is not very easy to use and will probably require some practice from you, but once you are used to finding light sources behind your subjects, you will be able to create very nice silhouettes.

TIP: As with many effects in digital photography, this one can we created in Photoshop too, so if you can't get to shoot silhouettes or you just don't get them perfectly, you can tweak them later on the pc. Here's how it's done in Photoshop

• Open your image

• Go to Image->Adjustments->Levels
• Take the lever at the lower end of the brightness range and shift it to the brigther areas, like in this screenshot

• Once the areas you want to silhouette are dark enough, click ok.
• That's it, this is what it will look like now.

Note: This only works if the shot was taken with a light source behind and has already some silhouette effect. If the shot has none of that effect you'll need to select the area you want to silhouette (I recommend using quick mask mode, pressing Q) and then repeat the same procedure.

And that's it for now, I recommend you not to take the easy way and try to take the silhouettes straight in the camera, but if not you can always cheat your way to perfection :D . Experiment and have fun

Understanding Metering modes

In our series of articles about "Mastering the basics" we learned about the different settings to use to get the right exposure, but we never talked about the way we metered available light.

Now, we're going to take a look at the camera's metering modes.

Every modern camera has a sensor that measures how much light is getting through the lens. In most cameras we can chose how we want the camera to do it. There are 3 different metering modes:

Matrix metering: The most used of all modes, the camera measures light from all points in the scene, and attemps to set the exposure in a way that the whole scene is properly lit.
This is a very easy to use and effective metering mode because the largest possible part of the image will be properly exposed. Similarily to the auto mode, though this metering mode has its limitations when we want to have some advanced control over the resulting image.

Center weighted spot metering: This mode comes in very handy when shooting differently lit scenes. Imagine for example, that you're shooting at a concert. The whole scene is dark, except for the performer in who is lit by spotlights. Using the matrix mode, the camera will try to expose the biggest part of the scene, as a result the preeminent darker zones will be properly exposed, while the performer will be overexposed. This will be in many cases far from the ideal result. In these situations we'll use the center weighted metering mode, now the camera will prioritize the area in the middle and expose properly for a portion of approximately 25% of the image around its center.

Photo by sint

Central spot metering: This is the most selective mode, the camera will expose properly for a point situated in the exact center of the image. The rest of the scene will not be taken into consideration. I do not recommend this mode in most of the cases because light can change a lot from one point to another and the readings won't be very useful if we use one point only. It can be a good mode to use if we want to select an exact point for the camera to expose properly though which can be useful for example for creating silhouettes or for complicated light situations.

Now, when you read about the last two metering modes you were probably asking yourself, what about the framing? What if I want the performer in the concert to be properly exposed, without framing him in the middle?

Well, camera designers were aware of this problem and that's what the Auto Exposure Lock button is for. Most DSLRs have this button that allows you to lock the exposure settings once your camera has taken the light readings and adjusted its settings accordingly. This will allow you to take the light readings from the performer by placing him in the center and then, with the AE-Lock button pushed frame the shot as you want to.

Summing up: Center weightered and center spot metering modes, allow you to chose the part of the image you want to be correctly exposed, while matrix metering mode will try to have the whole image exposed properly.

Shooting star trails

In our last article we learned how to shoot all kinds of light trails, now we're going to take a deeper look at how to shoot star trails.

First of all. What are star trails?

When you look at the stars at night, they seem to be stuck, but if you stare for a couple of minutes you'll start to realize that they're moving, only very slowly. This effect is created by the earth's rotation and not by the movement of the stars themselves. Every star in the sky makes a whole turn around the pole star. This particular one is right in the axis of the earth's rotation and this causes it not to move in the sky and always head north, that is why this star has been used by travellers thousands of years ago to guide themselves in the night, yes I like science :D but we're moving away from our main topic.

What is the effect of this motion when we shoot stars at night?



If we shoot stars with a shutter speed long enought to capture this movement, the stars will create trails in the form of circles around the polar star, decorating our shot with a very interesting sky.

How do we set up our camera to achieve these results?

This will be a little more complicated than with standard light trails. First of all you will need a remote control, or any other device that allows you to use the bulb mode of your camera. Setting up the maximum 30 sec exposure configured in your camera won't be enough to capture the star's movement.
To set up bulb mode we'll need to go into manual. Se the ISO to minimum, aperture preferably to a high value and shutter speed to bulb mode. Set the focus to manual and focus on infinity.
I also recommend using a long focal length because stars will appear to move faster when the lens is zoomed in.

And this is it, you can start to experiment with different compositions and shutter speeds, keep in mind however that very long shutter speeds will create too much noise in the image, remember turning the noise reduction function of your camera to minimize this effect. If you want to have longer trails, you can create a series of relatively short exposures and then blend them together in photoshop.



It is important to be able to identify the pole star, since all the stars will turn around it, making it a strong subject of your composition. To find it look north and find a very bright star.

And last but not least, keep in mind that this kind of photography works best at clear skies without luminic contamination, so run away from big cities.

Photographs by Corica, Warner Strauss and me.

Shooting light trails

If you've read the "Mastering the basics" section you already know a lot about how to use the exposure settings creatively. In this article we're going to take a look at using long shutter speeds to get light trail pictures.

What you're going to need:

A tripod. When shooting at speeds longer than a second the use of a tripod is a must, trying to take these images handheld will result in very blurry images. You can however try to lay the camera on some stable surface but this limits your creative possibilities a lot.

A DSLR or Bridge Camera. Most point and shoot cameras don't allow for exposures longer than 1 or 2 seconds so we'll need to use a DSLR or bridge camera that lets us choose the shutter speed.

How is a ligh trail created?

The creating of light trails is very simple. When we let the shutter open for a long time any bright light that goes through the camera's field of view, will create a trail of light through the image. Used properly these trails can create very nice effects on roads and can be an interesting addition to a cityscape shot.

The first thing you have to do for getting a light trail shot is finding a place with moving lights, a typical location to start at is a driveway. Set your shutter speed to a value between 5 and 30 seconds, I recommend using the Shutter speed priority mode . Now mount your tripod and frame the shot. Once a car approaches, click the shutter button. The lights of the car will create a light trail on the image as long as the shutter is open. Review your results and try using different shutter speeds.

Using flash. Although flash is not often used in light trail shots it can create a nice effect showing the object that creates the trail and the trail itself. I recommend using rear curtain flash, in this mode the flash is shot just before closing the shutter and it makes the subjects lit by the flash appear at the end of the trail. Something like this:

Going back to the techincal aspects, i recommend using a low ISO and enabling noise reduction in your camera's menu to reduce digital noise from the long exposure.

An interesting addition to our gear if we want to shoot light trails often is a remote control. Triggering your camera from a remote has 2 advantages:

1. We won't need to touch any button on the camera, eliminating every chance of creating blur in the image.
2. It will allow us to use bulb mode, in this mode you'll be able to open the shutter with one click of the remote and closing it with a second click. This way you can't exactly control how and where the trail is created.

A very special kind of light trail are star trails, but we'll talk about that in the next article so stay tuned!

Creating Panoramas

When we see panorama pictures we tend to think that these are taken with very specialized equipment. While this might generally be true, there are very easy ways of creating our own high resolution panorama with only a point and shoot camera or even a camera phone.

In this post. We,re going to learn how to use Hugin, an open source program, to create our own panoramas.

First of all we have to take the pictures. You need to take several pictures, as many as you want, that overlap themsleves partially on the sides, like this:



The overlapped area doesn't need to be as big as in the example, it will be enough with overlapping 30% of the image.

This will help the software find similarities between the images in order to stitch them together properly.

Now we will install the program. Download the installer from here. Once the program is installed, launch it and load the images you want to use for your panorama. Click on the load images button. Once you have selected the images, the program will start to align them automatically, if not click on the align button. This process may take some time depending on your computer and the size of your images, once it's finished you'll be presented with an image like this:



You can adjust the margins here so that you've got no black background, but I recommend you fix this in photoshop or any other editing program later. When finished close this window.

Now you only have to click on Create panorama. Select the folder and filename and you're done. Hugin will automatically stitch the images together and blend the margins making it look as a single image. When the process finishes, as before this may take some time, you'll have you image saved in .tif format.

Open it in your favourite editing software, cut off the black areas and you'll get something like this:

As you see this tecnique requires no special equipment and is very easy to learn. You can use any shots you want even those from a camera phone if the quality is enough. This is what I got from a couple of shot taken with an N95.

If you want your image to be of even higher resolution you can take the shots vertically, which will allow you to use more shots to put together the same field of view. This example is made with 5 vertical shots put together.

So, as we've seen it's very easy to create your own panorama shots by just shooting consecutive images and then stitching them together on the pc. Next time you go shoting landscapes, give it a try!

Shooting in RAW

When I was thinking about this post I was considering making it a RAW or Jpeg post, but after giving it some thought I think to me this question has a definite answer.

Shoot in RAW



Ok so why do I have such a firm opinion on the question?

Well, first of all let me introduce you to the topic.

RAW and Jpeg are 2 different image formats implemented on most modern DSLRs. We can configure our camera to store the images in RAW, Jpeg or both.
Now, what are the advantages and disadvantages of both filesystems? We'll start out analyzing how Jpeg works. When your camera captures an image configured in Jpeg it doesn't save what comes straight out of the sensor, instead it applies a series of automatically adjusted "filters" that adjust contrast, saturation, white balance etc. After that the camera compresses the image almost without losing quality and then saves it to the memory card.

The way the camera handles RAW files though is pretty different. When configured in RAW the camera will save the information coming out of the sensor without applying any further adjustments to the image.

Of course this lack of post processing and compressing has some issues. RAW files need specialized programs to be opened, like lightroom or picasa, but if you're a serious photographer you'll want to use one of those programs anyways so that isn't a problem. If you still consider this an issue you can always shoot in RAW+Jpeg so that you have a Jpeg copy of your RAW just in case you want to open it with other programs or in other devices other than a pc. Also shooting in RAW will occupy more space on the memory card, but with today's memory card storing 8gb at very reasonable prices I don't think this could be an issue.

Now back to the question at the beginning. Why do I encourage you to shoot in RAW?

The answer is simple: You're smarter than you're camera. (Ok most of you)

When you shoot in Jpeg your camera will automatically adjust a lot of settings according to its preferences, if you shoot in RAW instead your camera and developing program will only suggest the settings used but you will be able to adjust every one of these yourself. During this process you will be able to see how any of these changes affect the end result allowing you to adjust the processing to your very own taste.
This may sound like it's a feature only image enthusiasts would like to use but, trust me, it comes in very handy at shots where your camera's metering is fooled by special lighting conditions rendering it unable to create a decent image.

So all in all, shooting in RAW doesn't slow down your workflow in any way and it does give you a lot of options to adjust shots to your exact taste or to fix shots the camera didn't get too well.

Have a different opinion? We all can learn from each other, feel free to post a comment about it!

Camera modes

Now that we know the effects that every setting has on our image, we're going to learn how to tweak those settings in our camera's menu. It is possible that your camera has a different menu system but usually all DSLRs have the options I'm going to talk about.

Auto: Not much to say about this mode. It is fast and useful for the times where you just haven't got the time to think about the settings. The camera makes all the decisions about the exposure and even the metering modes, but now that we've learned how to use every of those settings, we want to have control over them, right?

P mode: This one is similar to auto mode, you set the ISO and the camera will automatically set the shutter speed and aperture for the shot. Also P mode allows you to control the metering modes, something we will talk about in future articles

Shutter Speed priority: This is were we start to take control of the settings, this mode will allow us to set the shutter speed and ISO we want and the camera will adjust the aperture to match the available light. Very useful for taking action shots or for playing with motion like we saw in the article about Shutter speed.

Aperture priority: This mode allows us to control aperture, and ISO while the camera will take care of adjusting the shutter speed. This mode is very useful for taking control of the depth of field like we saw in the article about aperture.

Manual: This is the mode, where you control everything. ISO, shutter speed, aperture, metering modes, white balance... .This might sound like it's the ultimate mode to use once you understand every setting, but in my opinion this mode makes it too difficult to get a correctly exposed shot, since it will be you that will have to tweak every setting until you get the correct amount of light. There are moments though where this mode will be the only option, like when you want to use the bulb mode of your camera. This mode allows you to have the shutter open for as long as you want and can be helpful for making very long exposures, like in star trail shots.

So, you will be asking yourself, which mode should I use?

The answer to this question depends on your skills and the situation you're in, as i said before you can use auto mode if you want to take a photograph quick without losing time on adjusting the settings, but the rest of the modes will give you more control over the shot.
I personally find myself shooting usually with P mode that allows me to control the ISO so that the camera doesn't accidentally bump it too high ruining the shot because of the noise. When i want to use some of the exposure settings creatively I just go into aperture or shutter speed priority mode, since they're much easier to use and will give you identical results to the manual mode.
Sometimes you'll just need to use the manual because the camera won't be able to get the shot exposed like you want. Don't be afraid of using it now that you know what every setting does, do keep in mind though that it will probably take some time to get the shot properly exposed. But hey you're doing this just for fun right? Just take your time and enjoy experimenting!