Scenery

This was a very bright day and direct sunlight was hitting this flower directly so I underexposed it a lot to stop it from blowing out. I used F2 and framed the shot so the background and foreground would be equally out of focus and you clearly see the line the depth of field follows from left to right. Due to the excessive amount of natural light I could keep my ISO levels as low as possible and still get very good handheld shutterspeeds. Deliberate underexposure can give an interesting effect soemtimes. As for editing, I used the sharpen tool once on the entire image, lowered the curve levels to give more definition to the yellow flowers leaves and finally added a border. Focus point selected to 2nd from the far right.

The light in this image was so-so, it was an overcast day and when shooting at 400mm you really do need much higher shutter speeds than the shorter lenses so I increased the ISO up to 500. Thinking back I was lucky - generally I'd recommend 1/1000th shutter speed with a 400mm lens as 1/640th could risk you getting blurred images so ISO 800 would have been better ! Focus point was set to the middle and white balance was set to " Cloudy " which is 6000K. Again as with the previous photo I chose to have the foreground and background bokeh ( image blur ) in the shot and use a point in the middle as a subject. F5.6 at 400mm still gives really nice isolation.

As well as deliberately under-exposing an image you can also over-expose which is what I did here to make the sun burn out even more and appear bigger than it actually was. Also by getting that extra bit of light into the lens I was now able to get just a little bit of extra detail in the branches and the mist coming off the cold winter ground too. Sometimes it's better to use manual focus for shots like this as sometimes excessively bright lights can confuse the cameras focusing system and of course remember never to stare directly at the sun through a lens for any longer than you need to. Eyes are important !

This was one of the moodiest skies I've ever seen. Because nothing really sticks out, F2.8 still keeps things relatively in focus. The focal point was more or less dead centre of the image. I exposed for the ground as the sky was already dark and moody and I wanted to keep the colour of the ground visible. As for editing, I boosted the contrast and played with the curve levels to make the clouds look harsher and almost dream-like. Nothing was singled out, all editing was applied to the entire image. Image was taken at 24mm. I wanted to get in as much as possible.

Another image I underexposed on purpose to give it a late night feel to it. The lake it the background was lit up by a bright sun so I used this as my background. The bokeh on this particular lens is absolutely gorgeous at F2 and turned the lake into nice big soft white circles which really add to the isolation of the reeds in the foreground. Due to the underexposure a lot of detail in the foreground is lost but I find that makes it look more ambient. As for editing, the entire image was sharpened in photoshop once only and a slight boost in constrast to bring out the foreground and background more.

A walk in the woods is always fun - lots of broken light, rays of light, shadows and interesting greeny / brown backgrounds and no end of different things to use as foreground and background subjects. In this case I just found a leaf poking into the frame and instead of moving it aside I chose it as my focal point and dropped the F number right down to change my shot completely. Focusing from front to back will often make things pop out of the scene which you might not normally see and again with a low F number you can melt away things in both the foreground and backgrond. The image is exposed for the single green leaf in the foregeound. In editing I used photoshop to sharpen the entire image once and added a border.

This shot was taken next to using a jumbo-sized bubble blower. Camera was set to AV mode and single shot focus with the AF point set to the centre. Because the bubbles drifted over nice and slowly it wasnt too hard for the camera to focus onto it, but with something this size and with the shutter speeds you'll get with your lens aimed skywards in good light at a low ISO and F number you can fire off so many shots in manual focus too and you'll get the right focus soon enough. As for editing, the image is sharpened once in photoshop.

Spring 2010, March 28th. Not so much the technique being the important thing here as the lens itself - you'll need a lens with a very low F number ( F1.2 is ideal, F1.8 + F2 are good too but F2.8 on lower zoom lenses will significantly reduce the bokeh effect that a lower F number produces in this situation ). The focal point is the flower on the right hand side and due to it being a bright sunny day I had to bring my ISO as low as it would go to stop it from blowing out. Very little editing, just sharpened once and sharpened edges once, border added and saved. At very low F numbers, the lens is not always at its sharpest but the background blur you can get and overall subject isolation can be a good compromise.

These 4 photo's were all taken using selective spot metering which I'll be writing a section on soon in " Articles " It's a nice freedom being able to control up to 8 different exposure points per image. Gives you much more to work with to make sure that nothing it too light, dark, blown out or impossible to see ! Have had lots of fun playing with it and flowers are a great way to start out as the lighter ones really do overexpose if you're not careful !