I think the biggest thing one can do to improve a flower shot is look around. Take a look at whats behind. Try to find a background for the flower with a nice color. When I’m taking flower shots I’ll look around and try to find a background color that will look nice with the dominate color of the flower I’m shooting. As example when I’m shooting lupine I like to find some poppies for a background and the opposite is true for poppies. Once you find a background you want you need to blur it to remove detail. The point is to have a background that is just a color with maybe some nice shapes (mainly blobs of color). To blur the background simply dial your aperture to the biggest you can get it. Depending on your lens that could be anywhere from 4.5 to 1.2. On a few lenses it will have a wider aperture but it your lens has a wider lens that even something like 2.8 you probably don’t need these tips.

So a quick side note. The wider the aperture the shorter the depth of field and the more your background will be blurred.

It can be hard in the field to find a background that is nice but its definitely worth the effort to spend a little time looking.

Oh by the way I have to credit Marc Muench on this tip as well as pretty much everything else I know about photography.

]]> http://hutsonphotography.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=30 0 http://hutsonphotography.com/blog/?p=16 http://hutsonphotography.com/blog/?p=16#comments Thu, 31 Jul 2008 05:03:51 +0000 admin http://hutsonphotography.com/blog/?p=16

Since I’ve seen a few posts requesting how to do those star trails pictures I thought I would do a quick post on it.

So first thing Star Trail pictures are really easy. What you need is a camera that supports a bulb mode (usually marked B). Most point and shoots do not support a bulb mode. The second thing you need is a tripod. Finally you need a locking cable release or intervalometer. Optional items would be a captains chair or some other folding chair a jacket and a mocha.

Now for the hard part. Set up your tripod point the camera so there is some sky showing. Lock the cable release on, have a seat in the chair and enjoy your mocha. After sometime (the longer you wait the long the star trail) close the shutter. That’s basically it. As long as there is no ambient light except stars you can leave the shutter on as long as you want you have no light to blow out anything.

The few gotchas are the aperture, the ISO rating and the direction.

First the aperture set the aperture to the optimum of the lens. The optimum is usually f8. You set the aperture to the optimum because you are going to set the focus to infinity. With the focus on infinity you need the aperture set to best setting for the lens.

Next the ISO setting. There are trade offs with the ISO. The lower the ISO the less stars will be distinguished but the less any ambient light will be captured. During my playing the best ISO setting I’ve found is 400. Usually the reason to lower the ISO as low as you can is to reduce noise but since the shutter will be open for minutes or hours the noise will come from the long exposure more than the ISO setting.

Finally direction. The “Great Circle” of stars is centered around Polaris (the North Star) in the northern hemisphere. The North Star can be located by first finding the little dipper. The two stars furthest from the handle, the outside wall of the dipper points (from the bottom up) to the North Star.

The other things to look out for are to make sure it’s as dark as possible. Even the light from a street light can become too bright when the shutter is open for 30mins. If the moon is up you will probably have to limit your exposure time to 20mins.

So if you are stuck taking a shot with ambient light you can figure out how long you can leave the shutter open fairly easily. If you’re like me you don’t have a light meter that will work in the dark. What I do is set the camera to aperture mode dial the ISO up to the max (3200 in my camera) and then adjust the aperture until the shutter adjusts down to 30sec. From there I can drop the ISO down to 400, each full ISO setting down doubles the time (1600, 800, 400). So down to 400 would increase the shutter time from 30secs to 4mins. Since the aperture is usually at 2.8 to bring it up to f8 that’s three full stops (f4, f5.6, f8). So from 2.8 to 8 the time moves from 4mins to 32mins (8mins, 16mins, 32mins). That’s how I figure out the maximum time I can leave the shutter open without blowing things out. The thing to keep in mind is with that little light you can usually double the time because depending on the response of the sensor or film it takes more light than normal to start registering. The other thing to remember one stop beyond 32mins would be 1hr 4mins (each stop is a doubling of time) and one stop again would be 2hrs 8mins, etc.

Actually the last line is only half true. Photomatix does make it a very easy to create HDR images but its not the only way. I’ve been creating HDR images with Photoshop for a few years by using layers. Starting with either, a few shots bracketed or a single raw shot processed to different exposures. I open the shots in Photoshop. Starting with the shot with the most amount of image the way I want I copy the other images to layers on the first image. Next I add hide all layer masks to each of the layers except for the background layer. Finally I select the layer mask of the different layers and grab the eraser tool, set the size to the size of the detail I want and change the opacity to some where below 100% (even as low as single digit opacity). With the eraser tool I start erasing the portion of the mask I don’t want (which causes the portion of the layers that I’m working with to show through). This paints in the detail from the different layers on top of the background giving me the image I envisioned (saw) when took the shot. After this is all done and I have the image I want I usually add a curve layer for black and white points and adjust the midtones.

Critiquing / constructive criticism or how to give a critique has been covered ad nauseam do a quick google and you will find a description of how to give one. I want to talk about accepting constructive criticism. Constructive criticism has caused so much hurt not because the person giving it doesn’t perform it correctly but because the person receiving it doesn’t receive it correctly. The person getting the critique is usually a very inexperienced photographer and so they haven’t learned to take a picture of something, they are still taking a picture of a memory. They take pictures to capture a reminder of how they felt at that time and place. The photographer usually has great emotional attachment to the time and place captured in the image. They take this emotional piece of themselves and ask a stranger to tell them what they think of their memory. The stranger doesn’t know that the flat picture of a beach is a picture of the last day of the best vacation the photographer ever had they see a poorly composed clich√ɬ© beach snapshot. When you ask some one to critique a picture you have to remember they can’t see the emotion you have for the picture and they shouldn’t see it. You asked them to look at a piece of paper that has some colors and shapes on it (or a file with said properties). When they tell you the light is flat or there is no subject or the flow of the lines draws their eye off the picture they’re not attacking you they are trying to tell you what emotions and reactions they have to the picture. Listen to what they have to say and ask them what they like and what they don’t like try to look at the picture through the filter of their description. When you’re out shooting and you look out at that beach with your patient significant other standing next to you take a reminder shot but then look again and see how the light looks, is it flat does it accentuate the ripples in the sand or make them disappear look at the curve of the shoreline. As your standing there remember what the reviewer said, is there something you did right in that picture you can do again, is there something you can do differently so you don’t make the same mistakes you did last time. You should remember a good critique and try and improve you photography with it. The critique should be a tool that you can use to carve away the filter of your emotions to see what is beautiful or repulsive in front of you so you can capture it and share it. Always remember a good critique is not an attack on you remember they are trying to help you. They are trying to help you improve your photography.

Oh by the way we went to Kauai for our anniversary trip.

I’m getting very excited about the trip and hope to make this as wonderful as the last one my wife planned. The one she planned was perfect. We stayed in San Diego on Coronado Island at the Marriott. I remember talking to one of my co-workers maybe a year before that trip about what the tourists do in San Diego and we couldn’t understand what would bring people there. I think we thought of the San Diego Zoo and Sea World and couldn’t come up with anything else to do. My wife really surprised me and showed me why people go to San Diego time and time again. We did all kinds of fun stuff while we were there. We of course did the usual, we went to the San Diego Zoo wild animal park and we went to Balboa Park. We also went kayaking, which we had never done as well as snorkeling which we had never done either. We went hiking at Torrey Pines (a wonderfully rugged state reserve worth visiting if you are in San Diego). All these things that I didn’t know you could do in San Diego she found. She really did a lot of work to make the trip very special.

When I do a business trip it’s of course for a specific task so any personal travel/exploration/photography have to be done around my work schedule so usually I can only go places no further than about 1hr from my work location. Usually what I do before I go someplace or as soon as I land, is grab a map find a green spot (city/state/national parks are green on maps) and go exploring. In my travels I’ve found small towns and great parks. Many places I’ve found are only places locals go to because its not worth traveling any great distance to, or at least it doesn’t seem to be worth the trip until you get there.

I plan to combine some of my business travel experience with this trip and try and go to some of the places that may not make the top ten list of places to visit where we are going. Hopefully by combining my business travel experience with a planned trip I’ll be able to give my wife the kind of memories that she has given to me.

So what does this have to do with photography? Actually this has a lot to do with photography. Being forced to travel to places I wouldn’t normally go has taught me to try and create my own “tripod holes”. It’s great to go to the places that the masters like Marc Muench ( ), David Muench, Ansel Adams and others have created great images at, but my best images were created in places that never make it on the list of places to go for that “perfect shot”. When you go traveling get out the map and find those green spots.