How To Get Better Digital Photography Lighting- Introducing The Histogram

Recently I was asked by a subscriber of mine in New York State as to how he could improve his daylight digital photos to create a more even light across his digital photos. I suggested that in digital photography there were many tools such as a polariser, a Neutral Density Filter and some other fancy tools.

He said “I mean after the pictures has been taken. I really want my digital photography to turn out a lot better than what I am getting.”

What he was talking about was a digital photography method called post-editing. Post means “after” and editing…well you know what that means. And in digital photography as opposed to photography you can edit your photos so much easily than traditional film photography.
What I advised Grant was that he had a few options. He could try editing his digital photography images by increasing or decreasing the light values via the Histogram. The Histogram is probably one of your best friends in digital photography that you could ask for as far as post editing goes. In a nutshell you simply open up your digital photos in Adobe Photoshop. Then once you have done that you click on “image” up the top menu bar. Once the menu box has come up you then click on “adjust” and then “levels” and up comes the Histogram.

The Histogram will display the light values from the brightest part of your digital photo to the darkest parts. It displays this light & dark information in the form of a graph. It looks something you’d see on the stock market to measure the trends of stock over a certain period of time. You might see thin lines or a block of black shadow with peaks and troughs.

The right side of the reading of the Histogram represents the brighter colours. The left side represents the darker colours. You can pull the brightness down to create a more even light over the picture if you have several overexposed parts of your digital photo. Or alternatively if there are too many underexposed parts of your digital photo you can increase the brightness.
You can increase the brightness significantly by pulling the slider to the left. And you can do the opposite with the sliders to the right. By pulling the far left or far right slider, you’ll be increasing the contrast. By pulling the middle slider either side, you will have increased brightness or darkness but not so much contrast. You’ll see that this is an incredibly simple yet powerful post editing digital photography technique.

If you have a digital photo that is underexposed with the handy Histogram you can simply change the ‘luminance output levels’. As a result you’ll create a more evenly lit digital photo.

Happy shooting!
Amy Renfrey

High Dynamic Range In Digital Photography

If you have ever wanted to improve your digital photography then you may want to consider learning about High Dynamic Range. If you have heard of this term in digital photography, but are not sure what it is, then keep reading because it will serious change the way you look at your digital photography images. What High Dynamic range does in your digital photography is simultaneously lighten your underexposed areas and darken your overexposed areas. Working with your Dynamic Range will aim to create digital photography images as your own eye would see them; even light all over the scene.

In the digital photography world Dynamic Range simply refers to the range of light (luminance) vales from the darkest to brightest. In the real world is really the range of dark to bright sections of light that you can see with the naked eye. This is transferred to digital photography and it given the name Dynamic Range. Digital Photography Dynamic Range is the range of light on your digital camera sensor that can be captured without having the higher light or lower light values altered or edited. In digital photography speak High Dynamic Range simply means a higher range of light values.

You will notice that after understanding Dynamic Range that your digital photography can be improved dramatically and, very fast. Digital photography Dynamic range can improve aspects of your image such as adding a sense of drama to your cloudy landscapes, giving detail to lines of colour, toning down some overexposed parts of light sections of a digital image.

You may find that when photographing things outdoors in your digital photography such as landscapes, beach and snowscapes etc, you have a lot of contrasting highlights that slow your progress down. To overcome sections of high contrast you can use ND filters, a polariser, exposure bracketing, post editing in Photoshop etc, etc, the list goes on what you can do in digital photography but really, to get a more accurate exposure working with your Dynamic Range will be more effective.

You can get a good idea of digital photography Dynamic when you go outside and look at the light. For example High Dynamic Range is the bright sunlight on a typical outdoor, sunlit scene. In saying that, a Low Dynamic Range may correspond to darker areas such as a dimly lit room.

Let’s take my Sony digital camera to use as an example. It has 6 stops of Dynamic Range. The Dynamic range’s objectives are to capture more dynamic range. While it’s easy to capture daylight scenes with the Sony, in some instances like landscapes, more Dynamic Range might be needed. So in this case producing my High Dynamic Range requires that I take some separate exposures. Then I place all of the brightness levels that I want in my final image that my Sony’s sensor can record properly. What this means is putting the darkest values no lower than in the mid-range of the sensors light sensitivity range.

In the wonderful Adobe Photoshop I may decide to take a handful of exposures to cover the complete dynamic range. In each photo exposure I keep the aperture the same (changing aperture changes the depth of field). My aim here is to create different photos making sure that in each I cover the available brightness levels in the landscape.

I take a collection of photos of my landscape at about 1 stop changes in each photo. I don’t do this by altering the f stop I do this via my shutter speed. To check whether I’ve got variation in my exposures I can check the histogram to see whether I have adequately captured the scenes brightness.

Once I have all my exposures in the camera I go home and check it out in Adobe Photoshop. What I should be able to do then is edit them and create a picture as my own eye would see; good lighting on the foreground and good lighting on the background, without over exposure of the sky or underexposure of darker parts of the land.

Have fun and happy shooting!

Amy Renfrey

www.DigitalPhotographySuccess.com

Picture ©A. Syed

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Digital Photography Multiple Exposures

Digital Photography is one of the most creative hobbies you can partake in. And sometimes we reach a stage of evolution in our digital photography whereby we want another challenge, or another way to express our creativity. And, undoubtedly, along your digital photography path, you'll come across a technique called "Multiple Exposures."

Multiple Exposures is a technique in digital photography whereby you can create a really ingenious effect. You can add colour, darken images, shade whiter areas, change shapes via light alterations etc. It’s really a fun digital photography technique and can give you much scope. For example in digital photography sometimes you will find that noise can interfere with picture quality and with this technique you can tone down the effect of noise.

An example of multiple exposures is taking two digital photography images and each of them to be exposed by one F stop. For example, let’s say that the first digital photos 'correct' exposure is F 16. You can take the first photo at F11 and the second one at F 8.

However not all digital cameras offer the ability to create multiple exposures. The digital cameras that can offer multiple exposures are dslr's such as Fujifilm FinePix S1 Pro and S2 Pro. Can you create multiple exposures without having more expense of a camera in your digital photography? Good news; the answer is yes.

This is where Photoshop comes in. By adjusting a few things in Photoshop, your digital photography images can become more and more interesting. In Photoshop you can actually create the most beautiful multiple exposures.

One of the first things to do to try this digital photography technique is to make sure you have the right exposure compensation. I won't go into complicated scientific jargon (light is pretty complicated at a base scientific technique) but what I will say is it’s a precision in digital photography metering that mastery is required. Instead of worrying about this in great detail, just know that in order to get the correct exposure value you may need to apply bracketing to your digital photography images. You can use your manual setting along with the meter to get some images that are a little darker than you would normally have, just for the purpose of this technique.

With multiple exposures it’s not necessary to keep every single photo you take. If you want to give an image more of a certain colour or brightness you can simply bracket accordingly. You can think of this as gaining momentum. You will find that after a while, you look at new eyes towards your digital photography.

Next week: How To Create Digital Photography Multiple Exposures In Photoshop

If you want to learn how to take sensational digital photography like the pro's do just go to www.DigitalPhotographySuccess.com

Winter Colour And Digital Photography

Winter and colour in digital photography is one of the most beautiful aspects about digital photography. The light that winter offers us provides a great relief from the harsh, unforgiving sunlight causes hard shadows for our digital photography. We can loose detail and definition during the summer months whilst partaking in digital photography, and can be very disappointing.

One great thing about winter light and digital photography is that the scene you are working with often shows you colour that isn’t seen as easily in hard light. The way it works is that the filtered effect of winter light helps us see the other colours that otherwise get lost in the warmer summer months.

The soft pale greens and pastel yellows in a digital photography scene can become lost in the overexposed contract of the outdoor summer sun. With digital photography in winter, those pastel yellows and pale greens become soft shades of a bigger colour, providing a great opportunity to show themselves as a more true and real presence on your digital photo.

And don’t forget about black and white photography during winter. An already black and white scene can make tremendous black and white photos in digital photography. Black and whites of subjects that are already black and white prove to have more of a contrasting effect. If you take this effect with soft winter light you will often find that your black and white digital photos retain some dramatic qualities about them.

Just remember though, when you are metering for black and white during winter time on the auto setting, your camera will want to underexpose the black areas and overexpose the whites. Just find a medium shade of grey in your scene and meter off that, providing you with some mid ground for exposure. This will work from a focus point of view if you are shooting some distance away.

I hope you are thinking of winter now with a new perspective. It’s a beautiful time for light and the filtered effect can bring otherwise pale colours out into the open making them appear more colorful. Black and white photography during winter can also provide some dramatic images as well. Work with this beautiful light.

Amy Renfrey

www.DigitalPhotographySuccess.com

Digital Photography During Winter

On many occasions during my time teaching digital photography I’ve had people say to me “oh, its winter, I can’t possibly take beautiful digital photos now.”

If you’ve said something like this about winter digital photography then just wait for this…

Did you know that digital photography during winter is one of the most fulfilling creative practices you can do? Digital photography is not just about summer; colour and bright sun shine….its much, much more than that. So here are some powerful digital photography tips for winter.

Firstly you can create some pretty sensational black and white digital photos during winter. If you live in a place that goes grey for the whole time winter is around, then consider this digital photography tip; maximise the absence of colour in your digital photography. You can create some very dramatic black and white digital photos of stormy skies, rain clouds; sheets of rain against darker objects making the rain look white in colour.

You can also try getting the most out of the blues, whites and blacks in your winter digital photography. Lets take for example a beautiful snow scene with a blue sky. You have all the softness of the gentle white snow blanketing your landscape or parkland. Along side this beautiful feeling you also have the stark black trunks of the trees, whether thick or thin. Then, to add to your digital photography experience, you may have the gentleness of an animal or the backdrop of a lake.

You see, what winter does for digital photography is feminise it. It takes away the masculine energy and replaces it with a quite, calm introverted feeling. Winter digital photography can offer you a soft light, which can provide beautifully filtered light in your daytime subjects.

When you partake in digital photography in the winter time the first thing you will notice is the light. Winter changes not only the physical temperature, but the temperature of light changes. There is less hard light and more bluish tones on your scene. It’s absolutely beautiful if, and only if, you maximise this to its full extent.

So just go and look. Look outside and notice how much beauty you see all around you. Look at the shades in your environment and see how much you can capture of this gentle bluish light.
It’s really divine.

The Awesome Power Of Lightening Combined With Digital Photography

Have you ever noticed that in digital photography there always seems to be photos of fork lightening that some clever photography enthusiast has mastered? The fact is that digital photography is a challenge and as soon as we develop the interest in digital photography we are challenging ourselves from the start. And a real challenge in digital photography is fast moving subjects. And when it comes to either traditional or digital photography catching electrifying fork lightening just is too much of a enticement to see if we can “win” the challenge.

So how do we apply our digital photography to sharp, brilliant streaks of colour over our images?

Getting great shots of forked lightening is not as difficult as you would think, or have been led to believe.

As a digital photography teacher I can honestly say that the first thing people do it buy way to much equipment for this exercise. You really just need a few simple things. A camera and a tripod are the main things.

The main challenge in digital photography when taking lightening shots is where to position yourself. I’ve had many a frustrating time, in the early days of my photography, trying to get the best angle, the best position only to find I had the camera pointed at completely the wrong part of the sky. And some of my digital photography lightening exposures were all wrong. I was thinking it was as hard as trying to predict a horse race with a crystal ball until I worked out the logic of it all and it started to become a lot of fun.

The first thing to keep in mind is to make sure your shutter is open. Lightening is sharp, short and sweet. Its important to get the most out of the long, open shutter speed by leaving it open for a long time. You can do this with confidence on a really black night such as being in the country on a dark night without any city lights or too many clouds around for the light to bounce off. In the country you may have the freedom to leave the shutter open for as long as 60 seconds.

However in the city it’s a bit different. What tends to happen is that due to other light in the atmosphere, light from buildings, streets and cars you can see this scene turns out much brighter on a 60 second shutter speed.

A quick way to get great lightening shots is to find a good place to set up where you know lightening is either happening or is about to happen. Take your tripod, camera and shutter release cable. The great thing about a shutter release cable is that once the lightening has struck there is no need to keep the shutter open and you can simply press it the shutter will close.

Try setting your aperture to about an f 8 or so and leaving the shutter open from anywhere between 10 seconds to 60 seconds. (Setting B). Set your IS0 at 100, set the focus to infinity and wait.

Digital Photography Safety

It’s a good idea, any time in digital photography, not to jeopardize your safety. Digital photography is intensely fun and incredibly educational and creative, but it’s not worth risking your life for. As much as it’s a beautiful spectacle, its much more wise to stay well away from lightening. It’s carrying enough energy to give your house power for two months solid, so be careful!

By Amy Renfrey

Picture copyrighted by James Stratton.