Digital Photography Guide

The bokeh effect

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The Bokeh-effect is how blurred you can get the background in contrast to the main object.

In tests and reviews of lenses one often run into the term ‘Bokeh’ which is refered to when the aspects of a lens is to be explained. The word tells nothing about what it means and it is one of those words many amateurs just ignore beacause it sounds too complicated. The truth is that the ‘Bokeh’-effect is something that probably most photographers have faced, both planned and unplanned and can be used to create really good portraits and close-ups.

The Bokeh-effect

Look at the merged photo above taken by me at a beautiful flower. The upper left-part of the photo which was taken using an f-number of 22 have almost the entire area in focus and you can even notice objects in the background. This is not the case in the lower right-part of the photo which instead was taken with an f-number of 1.8 where the entire background is blurred onto a soft colorful cloud. In short the ‘Bokeh’-effect is how blurred you can get the background of a photo in contrast to the object which you have in focus.

Often you find lenses with great Bokeh to be fixed lenses with a low f-stop value. This effect can also be applied in post-production by adding selective blur to parts of the photo in a photo edit application like Adobe Photoshop.

Selective black and white using Picasa

This is short step-by-step tutorial on how you can modify your photos into selective black and white using the free application Picasa by Google. The effect is what can be seen in commercials and on posters all over nowadays of a black and white image where a single object is still in color. When you are done with this tutorial you will know how to create the effect fast and simple just like a pro!

This is what we will be creating in this tutorial, worth to mention is that this technique is also great for photos of jewelry like wedding-rings.

And this is the photo before we modified it.

Let’s start!

Step 1

Start by open up the image you are to edit in Picasa editor. On your left side is all the tools we can use in a sleek tabbed interface. Next to these you have the actual photo which we are to modify.

Step 2

Click on the tab ‘Effects’ in the left-hand panel.

Step 3

Now click on the effect called ‘Focal B&W’ to launch the tool which will help us to apply our selective black and white over the image. When you do the photo will turn black and white but a green cross will be presented in the absolute middle of the image. As you can see there is an area surrounding the green cross which is still in color.

Step 4

By moving this green cross by clicking and holding the left mouse button on it you can change what part of the image which is to remain in color. Move the cross over ontop of the pink cab and release it.

In the left panel there will be two rulers which can change the apearance of the effect at the area which you have selected using the green cross. By moving the top ruler called ‘Size’ you can change how big the area should be which is to remain in color.

Move this ruler so that it fits the car only and nothing else.

And there you go, you have now successfully changed a photo from all color into a selective black and white! As an optional step we can adjust the overall setting of the black and white as well to make the photo look even better.

Step 5 (optional)

By using the adjustments in the tab ‘Tuning’ we can sett the overall lightning of the photo. In black and white photos it is often a good idea to increase the contrast to make the photo more dramatical.

And we’re all done, hope that you have learned something from this tutorial and that the knowledge will help you create some amazing photos!

Shoot like a sharpshooter in low-light

I ran across this article over at Lifehacker about using techniques that snipers are trained for even when taking photos. The example they had in this article was about the breathing-cycle used by sharpshooters to be as steady as possible in the moment of firing. By utilizing this technique also when taking photos you can reduce camera shake quite a bit.

So, the sniper is said to breath calm and normal. While taking aim, place the finger which is to be used to shoot on the trigger and keep breathing normal. Pre-aim as good as possible to keep a good view on what you are about to shoot. When the moment is approaching to take the shot aim during an exhale and squeeze of the trigger during the breath so that you finish off just before you need to breath in again.

To apply these rules to a photographer you just have to do exatly the same with your camera which was described with a weapon. Locate your target in your viewfinder, squeeze of the trigger during an exhale and have the photo taken just before your breath runs out.

At first you may feel a bit silly to practice this technique but after just a litle while you may feel it to be a quite natural way to take photos. And by getting it as your normal way of taking photos you will see that even your normal freehand photo-sessions may increase in quality.

I wrote another article about reducing camera shake a little while ago, read it through for more tips!

Memory cards – does size matter?

Wheter to use one large memory card or multiple smaller ones is a question most digital photographers have to ask themselfs at one point. The choice is almost as debated as Nikon vs. Cannon but I still would like to give my personal hint about the matter.

For simplicity we start of with a real life example of a photoshoot where a photographer is our for a full day of photographing a forest. When the day is over and the photos is about to be imported to the computer the memory card have become corrupted by moist and no photos can be imported. Using a large card available today perhaps one thousand photos would now be thrown away.

If the photos instead was stored on multiple smaller memorycards there is a great chance that not all cards would have broke at the same time and some photos could be saved. And this is the reason to why I use multiple cards instead of single large ones. It makes the risc of loosing your work a litle bit smaller.

Tip from the Autor » When taking photos on a trip or in places which are very crowded, do not keep all your memorycards in the same place! Buy a couple of small hardcases for your memorycards and keep some in your bag and some in a pocket for example. This will spread the risc even further if you for example loose your bag by mugging or just bad luck.

Black and white photography

Black and white photos do no have the luxury of using color to catch the viewer. Instead we must capture the other parts of a scene to being able to deliver the feeling we got. There is also of course some photos that have better capabillties to become a great black and white photo then other. Urban photography is very trendy today and most photographers have tried it in some way. Often the objects found for this kind of photos are torn, old and have a high amount of contrast dy rust, old paint and materials and also quite often a less amount of ambient light. The perfect urban photo can be found in a sewer pipe with no direct sunlight or in an abandoned and shut building. Both of the examples with very low light. Low light is not always bad though, by utilizing the low light and beeing able to capture longer exposures we can create beautiful photos of ugly things and areas.

Often black and white photography can seem to be easier then color photography due to its forgiving effect. But in fact it is the complete differece. To being able to capture a great black and white photo the photographer have to see beyond the colors onto the object itself.

Filters
Different photos can call for different settings to be used to utilize the most of the situation. A nice blue sky can when desaturated look pale and lifeless instead of varm and beautiful. Using filters can help you to change the feeling of a black and white photo by bringing you more contrast and more details between the different colorscales which you are to remove.

If you have a very bright sky you can use a red filter to darken it while keeping the details in the foreground.
To bring more life into mist and fog you can go for a blue filter which will help those greys to jump out of the blur.
Green filters are great to use to capture the difference in greens while photographing vast landscapes or scenes of nature.

Camera settings
Most cameras today have the option of saving photos directly in black and white, both when using JPG and RAW. As most books and guides will tell you the best way to photograph black and white photos is to do so using RAW but not to use your cameras black and white setting. The main reason for this is so that you keep the colorinformation if you for any chance would change your mind afterwards and feel that the photo look better in color. You can also use the colorinformation to keep a single object in color while the rest of the photo is in black and white. This is an effect that have become very trendy lately and can be seen in many places.

“But if I shoot in color and RAW, how do I get my photos to become black and white?”, you might ask. Well, photoeditors today can create great black and white scales of color photos and the ways of desaturate an image are many. The easiest way that is almost always an option in editors is to change the colormode to black and white. This is a technique that might be a bit rough and you do not have as much control over it as you want but as an amateur photographer it will be enough for you to start getting a grasp on the posibilities.

Noise have an tendency to show even more in a black and white photo which mean that we should always keep the ISO-setting of the camera as low as possible. As soon as we start moving up the ISO we introduce noise which will show in our photos and sometimes this is something we want but most of the time we do not want this. It is due to this better to keep the ISO at the lowest setting possible for the scene and instead add noise in post-production if wanted.

General tips
A bright and sunny day can be great for your regular photos but might create slighly overexposed photos in black and white. To counter this at an early stage try to underexpose a couple of steps to keep the spectrum more balanced.

Great scenes for black and white photographs

Urban photography and decay in general have a natural feeling of desaturarion.
Architecture and abstract creations can be hard to photograph in black and white due to many areas with plain colors but in an interesting angle they can be great.
Landscapes can sometimes loose their grandness due to the strong colors. By removing the colors the observer can focus on the whole picture and not the stray details.
Textures exist all around us from macro-photos of a leaf to the patterns of a brick wall, and they all is just made for black and white photos in high contrast.