Using Zones for Black and White Photography Exploring Photography with Mark Wallace AdoramaTV

Done this episode I'll be showing you my
abbreviated version of the zone system for shooting black and white photos.
Adorama TV presents Exploring Photography with Mark Wallace.
Hi everybody welcome to another episode of Exploring Photography right here on Adorama TV. I'm Mark Wallace in the city of Puno Peru
and my altimeter says that I'm just shy of 13,000 feet and so Im having
a tough time breathing on this very busy street. Well I was out shooting today with my 5D
Mark III, my 24-70 millimeter lens and there is not a cloud in the sky
there is just a lot of shadows and contrast and that means it's a perfect
setup for shooting black and white photos and
that's what were gonna be talking about in this episode. Shooting black and white photos using
the zone system that was originally created by Ansel Adams.

I'm going to be showing you my
abbreviated version, my interpretation of his own system, specifically on how to do
post-production and get really contrasty, dark, moody images. But before we do that I wanna
talk to you about the contests that Adoramas hosting right now. They have
awesome contests and you can win some great prizes. So click the link can you might win
today.

Now when we're shooting black and white
photos were not actually just shooting black-and-white, were shooting black a bunch of shades of grey, all the way to light grey to white. Now back in the past we only shot film,
there was a system called the zone system that Ansel Adams created and system was used for seeing light for
processing negatives and going into the dark room to process
your prints so you'd get these really high contrast, beautiful prints. We don't talk much about this zone system
these days because well film and digital photography are a little
bit different. But in this episode i wanna talk to you about my abbreviated version
of the zone system.

Instead of using 12 stops of light like
Ansel Adams did, were gonna use 5 zones. Now don't send me an email saying this isnt the zone system. I. Know it's not the zone system, but it's rooted in the zone system.

Well lets talk about those five zones of light. Those zones are black, shadows, mid tones, highlights and whites. Now to understand all of this
stuff better we really need to dive into Lightroom
and take a closer look. So let's do that right now.

To get started let's take a look at
those zones again we have black, our shadows, mid toness, highlights and whites. Now they are not distributed like this in this top bar. If we looked at in evenly distributed from
black all the way to white. A gradient.

The blacks really take up just a
small portion or the very darkest the greys. Our shadows take up a lot
larger portion. The mid tones are right in the middle.Our highlights take up another large portion, and our whites really are the
very very edge, the absolute whites. Now we can
actually see these in our develop module on the histogram.

So take a look here you can see it says blacks, shadows, exposure, now that's mid tones and well explain that later why thats called exposure in the
histogram, and then we have our highlights and our whites. We can see on the histogram we actually have spikes here that shows us that this lines up to what our zones are. We have two spikes over here in the
highlights because we have a highlight here and then I made this little background its a little bit lighter and so that shows up as the second spike. We can also see that these show up here.

We've got exposure or our mid tones. Weve got highlights, shadows, whites and
blacks. We're gonna be using need to adjust our images. Now what we want to do, we
have a goal, and our goal is to create high contrast
black and white images using these zones to manipulate
the total values in our images.

We want blacks that are
absolutely black, and we what whites that are absolutely
white and we want to adjust everything else according to our
artistic vision. The process works like this. First we adjust our mid tones. Then we set our black and white points.

Next we adjust the
shadows and highlights according to our artistic vision. Then we make color
conversion adjustments if we need to and then last, we do some fine-tuning. Well
now that we know the basic steps to our process let's put those steps into action by editing 3 images. The first
image we're going to edit is this color image.

We're going to learn how to identify
where the different zones are and then convert this to a high contrast
black and white image. This will give us the basics of our editing process. The second image is this image of this lock. Were going to do
something I like to call zone shifting, where we set our black and
whites and our mids.

Then were gonna shift some of those shadows and highlights zones into other
zones to create a really high contrast sharp image. Then
lastly we're going to take a look at this image,
where we shift some the color conversions to see how color impacts our black and white conversions. Its really important. Let's get started by editing this
wall.

So I will go over into the developed module. Now before we get started on this I wanna
show you a little trick that Lightroom has for us. So Im gonna open up our chart that we
started with. We need a visual cue to show us where the absolute whites and the absolute blacks are when we begin to edit our images.

Now to
do that what we can do is there are these little triangles up here in the histogram and
this will show us our clipping. So highlight clipping and our shadow
clippings just click on that. Anything that absolutely white will show
up as red. Anything that's is absolutely black will show up as blue.

I can turn it on and off by hitting
the J key. Or by clicking these little triangles in
histogram. I prefer the J key and so that will really
help us out. Alright so let's get started on this
wall here.

The very first thing I want to do is
set my mid tones, and do that, actually very that first
thing I want to do is convert this from a color treatment to a
black-and-white treatment. So let's do that right now. Now the first thing I want to do is to
set my mid tones. Now I do that by using the exposures
slider.

What I can do is if I slide this to the
right my mid tone values will increase and if I slide this to
the left they will decrease. In other words in luminosity they'll get brighter or
darker. That way I can say, you know what do I want this to be my mid tone or this to be my mid tone? If I want this to be my mid tone well, I need
to sort of slide that to the right. If I want this to be by mid tone I need to
slide that to the left to bring that into my mid tone values.

That's the very first thing you want to do
is, say where your midterms are and you get to choose. This is something Ansel
Adams was a big about saying you choose where the middle gray
is and then work your way out from there. So
I want my middle grey to sort of be this bottom area and this door, this
bottom door. I don't wanna lose a lot of details in the blacks up here where the shadows are in the door.

So I'm gonna bring that back pretty close to
where it was because I thought we had a pretty good starting point. So right back to 0. This image we have a
good starting point. Right next let's set the black-and-white
points.

To do that I'm going to press 'J' on my keyboard so I can start bringing
the blacks down to see where that is showing up.
See Im getting a lot of blacks here. Im gonna bring this down so I start seeing
blacks not bleeding into the details in the
shadow areas, because I wanna still see that. So Ill bring that down. Think that's about as much as I want to
do there because its starting to impact the door.

I wanna see those details. Next I'm gonna bring my whites up. You can see on the histogram we don't have any whites. So I will bring those over to the right.
Keep going, keep going, keep going.

Now we start to see some white showing
up in our image and that is really giving us a lot more contrast then we
started with. Right now that I have my black and white point set, I will turn off
those warning labels. Now Im gonna start working with my shadows. Up here in this
corner we don't really see much in the door and so what I'll do here is Im going to take the shadows and shift them to the
right to bring the more into the mid tone area.

Now we're seeing some of those values show up here. We can actually see the details in the door and up here on the wall and then I'm
going to play with the highlights just a bit. Bring those down just a hair, maybe a
bit more. So Im gonna see a little bit more of the
detail in this wall.

That looks pretty good. Now im I need to
do some fine-tuning here. One of the things you can do as you can do is you can just go into the contrast slider and just slide that back and forth or do some sharpening and
some things like that. I think this is a pretty good basic
conversion from our color to our black and white image.

Right now
that we have some of the basics down let's get an image that is more
appealing to us. When I was shooting this wall I notice that there is this lock on
the door that had some really interesting light and so
that's where we're going to go next. So here is our lock. Now this lock were
really gonna get into  the nitty-gritty of converting to black and
white.

Notice that we can see details across the board here. So we've
got shadows here we can see detail in the upper right-hand side. I want
this to be a super contrasty image. So the very first thing I'll do is
convert this again of the treatment to black and
white.

Alright this is sorta contrasty it but is not where I
want it to be. The mid tones are exactly where I want
them to be I like where  the mid tone values are. So Im not gonna
change the exposure slider at all it. Its  in a good place.

But I really want this to be
more contrasty, so I'm gonna turn on my clipping warnings here. I'm gonna
start by taking my blacks way down. So were gonna go all the way down into the eighties maybe about right there. So 88, 89 in that area.

So you can see that I've really taken the blacks down. So we've
got a much more contrasty image but you can see we don't have any
whites in this image really. So let's do that next. So Im gonna take my
whites and I will keep those going higher and higher and
higher.

Until I'm about well, about right there. I'm judging
this based on these red clipping highlights showing up. These little
the warnings. So I want this to be really contrasty and you can see immediately that we have a high contrast image.

But we lost a lotta detail up here. Our shadows have gone away. Our detail on our lock is gone away and
so we need to bring that in. So now let's play with the shadows and the highlights.

So the shadows what I
want to do to bring some detail back in So Im gonna say you know what, shift those to the right
about like that so we're in the forties the upper forties. So you can see that we are just now are starting to get a little bit more detail up here that was completely black. So
we've shifted the shadows from black back into the shadow area. So
we've shifted that zone back.

The next thing I do is play with
the highlights here. Now the highlights what I want to do is I want to take them and i wanna go the
opposite way. So I checked the highlights from the highlight area and shift them
down into the mid tone area.  So Im gonna go left and shift those
down.

Down, down, down. So were gonna take those down into the 50s. About like that, and that is affecting this area right
here making it much, much more contrasty. I really like this.

Now one of the issues though I'm having
is I really wanted to see the detail on that lock. Well guess what we can go
up here and we can use an adjustment brush in
Lightroom. I'm gonna tell it to take my shadows all the way up to almost 100
and then I'm going to paint on top of this lock here and that's
shifting those really dark shadows up into almost
the mid tone range. Not quite but we're getting
some of that detail back.

So Ill close that. You can see we
have a really dramatic image. So we went from
something that wasn't very contrasty to do something that's
extremely contrasty. Take a look at that.

Lets see if we can look, I saved a little  a snapshot here and you can see where we
went from the color image back to where we were. There. That is a huge, huge difference. Okay last but not least we've gotta
figure out how color impacts our black and white images.

So what we're gonna do is we're gonna go
into this portrait that I made of this gentlemen here in Puno. A really
great guy. Now one of the things that happens
when you go in and you create a black-and-white image from a
color image, is the colors are converted to different luminosities and by default Lightroom determines what
those color mixes are. You can see this down
here in the black and white mix.

So theres sort of this auto setting that
happens automatically. Now we can't go into great detail into
that in this episode but I didn't an episode on it. Its digital photography 1 on 1 : episode 232 :
how color influences black and white photography. I
really suggest that you watch that.

Let's take a look here. If we go over
here there's this little dot. I can click on that. When I do I get the
special icon and then  I can click on area in an image and I
can make it darker or brighter.

What I'm doing is I'm
adjusting the luminosity of  the orange in my conversion and by doing that I am making this guy's
face darker or brighter. So maybe sometimes I'll
go in here and I'll click this auto conversion. You can see that this is
sort of a dull image, but I can click on his face I can
bring that up. I can click on the background I can
bring that down.

Uou can do all kinds of things, you can make his coat a little bit darker. I can get a much
much better conversion by playing with this mis of colours in my black and white mix. Again make sure you look at Episode 232: how color influences black and white
photography for more information on this but don't forget that that is available
cuz you can really make a big difference to your black and white images. Right
there you go all the different steps for converting images from color to black and white
using the zone, the abbreviated zone system and some color conversion.

Well I hope this
will you help you with your post processing a black-and-white images. I just want to mention that this
video doesn't include everything that we could possibly talk about about black
and white photography but I have some more videos at the Adorama
Learning Center that will help you with this topic. Specifically fifty shades of
black about processing the different mid tones and shadows and
blacks in an image. Understanding stops if that's new to you
and a bunch of other videos so make sure you check out the Adorama Learning Center for more
information and don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss a single episode of Exploring Photography or any
Adorama TV video.

Thanks again for joining me and I'll see you again next
time. Do you want great-looking prints at low-cost? Be sure
to visit our easy to use online printing service. Adorama pixs has professionals who treat your images
with the utmost care that you can count on. For a quick turnaround on photos., Cards or
albums use adoramapix.Com.

Using the Histogram for Better Exposure Exploring Photography with Mark Wallace

Hi everybody welcome to another episode of Exploring Photography right here on AdoramaTV, brought to you by Adorama. It's the camera store that has everything for photographers like you and me. In this episode I want to talk to you about the histogram and how you can use it, to make sure you're getting the correct exposure and to avoid dynamic range issues. In other words, how does the histogram help us in real life shooting from day to day? Well first, let's talk about what the histogram is.

When we take a picture our camera is capturing not only color but tonal values. In other words, absolute black, to middle gray, to absolute white and everything in between. What the histogram does is, it plots all those values on a scale so we can see how many black pixels or dots do we have in our picture, how many gray pixels, how many white pixels? We can use that, to see if our exposure is correct, or if we have issues with things either too bright or too dark. In other words, "dynamic range".

Now, to help understand this let's think about a classroom. So we've got a bunch of students sitting in desks. Some of the students are pretty smart. They're going to get A grades.

Some of them are going to get B's, some C's and then we're going to have some kids that aren't so disciplined. They're going to get D's and some will fail the class, they're going to get F's. We can take those grades, those values, and we can plot them on a scale and show the distribution of those values. So the A's will go here, the B's will go here, C's, D's and our F's.

The important thing to understand is, it doesn't really matter where those students are sitting in the classroom. Doesn't matter if the A students are on the left and the F students are on the right, it doesn't work that way. It's just showing the distribution of our values. The A's go on the left column the B's next to it, all the way over to the F.

In the same way when we take a picture, it's not showing us what the different values from left to right in our scene, it's just showing us on the left-hand side of that histogram that's how many black pixels we have in our camera and how many middle grays and how many whites. To illustrate this point, I found this wall here. There's a black portion and a white portion but watch what happens if I take a picture of just this white door. Watch what happens.

So I'll take a picture here and now I'm going to take a picture of this black section right here. I'll do that. Okay Now if we look at these two images side by side, you'll see that they are both gray. Now the reason for that is the camera's through the lens metering, is trying to average all these tones out to get middle gray but if it's white? It's going to do something that's wrong, it's going to make it gray and if it's totally black it's also going to be wrong, it's going to overexpose and make it gray instead of black.

Watch what happens if I take these pictures together. So I'll put the black door and the white wall together and now you can see that we have both black and white. So how do we know in a real-life situation if our camera was getting something wrong? Well, that's where the histogram comes in. So if I take a look at my histogram for the black wall, you can see clearly that it's right in the center.

So my histogram is telling me this is overexposed. If I look at the white wall you can see again that my histogram is showing me all the values are right in the center saying, hey this is underexposed. So using that histogram I can see if my camera is getting my exposure correct. Now, we're not going to ever be shooting, I hope, just a black wall or a white door.

We need to look and see how this is going to work in a real life situation. So let's do that next. Here are some tiles that have caught my attention here on this busy street and what I want to do is take a picture of this. I also want to get some of this pipe here because it's got some texture and I really like that.

Now because these are almost white, I think my exposure might be off, just like that white door. So I'm going to frame this up just a little bit here, make sure I'm all in focus. I'm using Aperture Priority mode, and I'm shooting and when I look at my histogram here I can see that it is underexposed. This on the histogram should show up in the highlight area but it's showing up right in the middle as middle gray, so just like that white door, this is underexposed.

So what I'm going to do is, I'm going to use Exposure Compensation. I'm going to adjust my exposure by about a stop and then I'm going to shoot again. This is going to slow down my shutter speed. Now take a look.

Now that is showing up in the correct area of my histogram, right in the highlight area toward the right side of the histogram and that is the correct exposure. So the histogram is going to let me know if this is correct or not without having to go into post-production to make adjustments. Our histogram can help us understand if we have any exposure issues, specifically dynamic range issues. Now, dynamic range is our camera's ability to capture the darkest of darks, to the brightest of brights and how much of that we can capture is our cameras dynamic range.

If you have something that's a little bit too bright or a little bit too dark it will fall out of the exposure. In other words, it's going to have no detail in the brights or no detail in the darks. We don't want that and so our histogram can tell us if we have an issue. So behind me I have sort of a bland scene but it's perfect for illustrating this.

I'm going to turn around here, I've got this little patch of sky up there. So I'm going to take a picture of this little grove of trees here. When I do that I can look at my histogram and my histogram is telling me that I have an issue over on the right-hand side of my histogram, there's a spike. We have our whites that are climbing the wall.

In other words, there's a spike to the right and that's an indication that something is overexposed. So if I zoom in, I can see that clearly the sky is way overexposed. My histogram is telling me I've got an issue with that part of the sky so I can either shoot a HDR image or shoot at a different time of day, which is probably the best solution, or just shoot from a different angle, or shoot something else. Right now my histogram is saying if you shoot that, right now, I've got an issue.

Our histogram can also make sure that we have a proper exposure and tell us if we have any issues. Now check this out, so Salim here who's been doing some B-roll and camera operating, so he's been running the video camera for me, he has volunteered to be the model today. So I'm going to take a picture of him. Behind us we have sort of, a dark background we have some overcast light right here, really nice soft light so I.

Want to see if this is going to give us a proper exposure. So I'm shooting at f/1.4, ISO 200 at 1/750th sec. Salim, look right into the lens here. Take one more shot, and then what I'm looking at, on the histogram, is to see if I have any issues.

But my histogram shows me that I have room to the left and room to the right and all the values in between are falling in the middle of that histogram and that means, that I have nothing in this scene that's absolute black, nothing that's absolute white. That means in post-production if I want to tweak this to make it a little bit more contrasted, I've got room to grow. This is a good exposure. Nothing's climbing the wall to the right or the left.

I can just look and see that everything is good. There you have it, the histogram can help you when you're out shooting to make sure you get a proper exposure and to make sure you avoid dynamic range issues. If you want to know more about the histogram specifically for post-production check out the Adorama Learning Center, there's all kinds of things, in fact, one of my favorites is my video about using the zone system for black and white photography, make sure you check that out. There's something else I need to tell you, I'm starting to write articles every other week for the Adorama Learning Center so check them out.

It's absolutely free and also don't forget to subscribe to AdoramaTV, that way you don't miss a single thing. Thank you so much for joining me and I will see you again next time..

Understanding Exposure The Exposure Triangle with Mark Wallace

Hi everybody I'm Mark Wallace, in this
episode I'm going to explain the exposure triangle, which is the foundation for everything in photography. AdoramaTV presents, Exploring Photography with Mark Wallace. Hi everybody, welcome to this episode of Exploring Photography right here on AdoramaTV, brought to you by Adorama its the absolute best camera store in the world, in fact anything you see in our videos
you can buy them at Adorama, check them out at Adorama.Com. Well in this episode we're going to be talking to you about the exposure triangle, it's
really the foundation for everything about photography, once
you understand how the exposure triangle works you're going to be able to make sure you get a great
exposure but you're also going to learn how to take control of all the buttons and dials on your camera and what they do and why
they're there, but you will also get creative control of your photographs, so you can tell a better
story and so that's what the exposure triangle is all about.

In fact we're going to be spending a
few episodes on the exposure triangle, we're going to break it
down piece by piece so you can really get a handle on all
the stuff that it does. Well when we think about exposure a lot of the times
we think about images being too bright or too dark but
there's more to it than that, we can have images that are noisy or images that are
blurry are really nice and crisp, or images they have lots of stuff
in focus or just the one thing that and focus or maybe its totally out of focus altogether
and the exposure triangle helps us understand how all of that works together and the exposure triangle is made of three things and these three things never change
so once you have these down you're going to be good to go forever so don't fret it's very, very simple. In the
exposure triangle we have the aperture, the shutter, and ISO. And the three things work together
to give us a perfect exposure.

I want to start to explain this
by looking at the aperture, now the aperture is inside your camera
lens, in fact if I take this lens off my camera and we can look at
this really close, I can move this in and out and you can see clearly that
the aperture is just this thing that let's light, more light in or less light in, its
growing and shrinking. So our aperture is in our lands and I can make it really big or
really small by just changing aperture value. Now our aperture values have
numbers like f/22, f/16, f/11, f/8 and the smaller the number
the larger the opening, and the larger the number the
smaller the opening, I know that seems backwards but that's how it is, f/16
is really small f/1.4 Is really big now it's not
important that you know what those numbers mean right now, we're going to explain that in a future episode right now it's important to understand
that a big number means a small opening and a small number means a big
opening, I guarantee we're going to make that make sense free in a future
episode, but just remember a big opening means lots of light is
coming through and the small opening means not
very much light is coming through so we've got a big number not very much light because its a small hole, a small number means a lot to light is coming through
because it's a big opening. Our aperture controls the quantity of light
coming into our camera so that little thing in
our lens it can be open or closed, its letting a different quantity of
light come into our camera.

Well there's another thing in
our camera, everyone already I'm sure knows about this, it's called the shutter. Now the shutter can go at a
really fast speed, in fact we'll look at this there's the shutter, BAM, when I turn on my camera it
goes wham really, really fast or I can
slow that down that was at about 4,000th of a second, I can
do all way down to 500th of a second even down to a 30th of a second, and I can get a
lot slower, half a second, one second all the way down to 30 seconds, even a few minutes, so
just like the aperture where it allows lots of light and not very
much light, the shutter does sort of the same thing, with the really fast
shutter, not very much light is coming into our camera, a really slow shutter, lots of light is coming into our camera. So we've got
these two things the aperture that can let in lots of light or not very much
light, and the shutter that can let in lots of light or not very much light and those two
things have to be balanced on sort of like a scale, so if this on is letting in a lot of light well then this one needs to restrict so we don't get too
much light, or of this one is letting in not very much light we need open this one up
so we get more light, so there's always a play in those two
things trying to figure out how much light to come in and we're
want to talk about how our camera figures that out in a little bit. The third thing in our
exposure triangle is called ISO, an ISO controls the sensitivity of our camera to light.

Now there's more to
it than that and a lot of those really geeky guys that know lots of science are always going to post a comment and say no
it's about gain and all this stuff, but it's really easy to remember our ISO controls how sensitive our
camera is to light much like our eyes in a dark theater, when
we go into a dark theater at first we can't really see, but as our
eyes adjust to the darkness then we can see just fine we can, but we can't see as
well as we can in bright daylight. The same thing is true of ISO, when
you have a low ISO number like 100 or 200 our camera isn't very sensitive to light
and so we have to either open up our aperture really wide or make
a slow shutter speed or have to be a really bright area, a really
bright day and as we increase our ISO our camera becomes more
and more sensitive to light the problem is we also get noise in our
images so there is a penalty for having a high
ISO. So we have those three things, the aperture more
and less light, the shutter more and less light, and the ISO more and less sensitive to light which is sort of the same thing as more or
less light. Getting those three things in balance we have something that's built into
almost every modern camera and that's called a meter.

Now think about
the meter sort of as a judge, the meter is looking at the
settings of our cameras and saying hey if you set the aperture to this wide I've got to figure out how fast the shutter
speed should be, or if you set the shutter speed in this fast I've got to
figure out how big or small the aperture should be, so
the meter is judging things for us and something
thats very important to note just because two settings work, or three
settings work in one situation doesn't mean it'll work in a different
situation because light is constantly changing and that's why we need a meter in our
camera. Alright lets put all of this stuff
together, now that we know about the three things ISO aperture and
shutter and the judge or the meter that's built into our
camera, how does all on this work? Well it's pretty simple, normally on the exposure triangle you set two
things and our camera figures out the third
using its meter so you'll set either the ISO and
the aperture and the camera will figure out the
correct shutter speed or you'll set the ISO and shutter speed and
the camera will figure out the correct aperture value and it does that using
the built-in light meter. Now the question you're asking
me is, well which one do I start with, do I set the
aperture or should I set the shutter? Well it really depends on the kind of
photographer that you are, traditionally scenic photographers and
portrait photographers are more concerned with the aperture
than they are with the shutter and the reason for that is the aperture helps us
control how much of an image is in focus and scenic photographers want
everything in focus, from the front to the very end so they want a small
aperture value and the shutter can do whatever it wants to do because the
camera is on a tripod, and portrait photographers want sort of the
opposite of that. They want a nice clear image if somebody's face but they want the background to fall out
of focus and the aperture helps us do that so scenic photographers and portrait photographers care about the aperture, while the people that deal with motion,
specifically sports photographers they care about the shutter because the
shutter controls motion it either freezes motion or shows motion
because the shutter controls the the duration of time, how long light
comes into a camera, so if you want to shoot somebody dunking a
basketball or a race car or a bicycle going by you care about your shutter speed and the
aperture can do whatever it wants to do and you're probably still going to be happy.

Thats the beginning point we're going to
delve into both of those things in future episodes in fact we're going to delve into all of
this over a series of episodes, the next episode we're going to talk about depth of
field in the aperture and all the things that it does and how the aperture
affects your lens choices so you'll learn how to buy the proper lens
for your needs, then we're going to talk about the shutter speeds, we're going to understand stops, how everything works together we're going to
understand metering, we're going to talk about how the camera meters light and sometimes it gets it
wrong, and we're going to tell you how to get it right every single time. I'm going to tell you how to shoot in manual
mode using the exposure triangle and a lot more so stick with us, we have a lot to come in Exploring
Photography over the few episodes. Well thanks for joining me for
this episode of Exploring Photography and don't forget everything that I'm talking
about today you can read more about that at the Adorama Learning Center, its absolutely free so
check that out and AdoramaTV is absolutely free so click
the subscribe button because I know you don't want to miss a
single episode. Thanks for joining me this week and I'll see you again next time! Do you want great-looking prints at low-cost? Be sure to visit our easy to
use, online printing service.

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your images with the utmost care that you can count
on. For a quick turnaround on photos, cards or albums use Adoramapix.Com.

Tripod Features for Digital PhotographyQuick Release for Tripods

It's got some features that I like. One of
those is the ability to remove the camera mount and this will screw right in after you've
removed it to the bottom of your camera. Just like this. So, that if you need to take a
picture that's not on the tripod, you don't have to unscrew it every time.

You can just
have this quick mount setup that will lock in and hold it motionless like that. And, it will quickly release like
that. So, in my opinion that's important. And, some tripods you can get more heads and
some you can buy them with extra heads already in the box.

And, this is a good feature. I
recommend it highly..

Tripod Features for Digital PhotographyFluid Head Feature for Tripods

Ok. This is a typical camera tripod and normally
they're under fifty dollars. And, sometimes you can even get them under thirty dollars.
Now, they have easy to do release so that you could lock them down at any length. In
the past, they've had sort of screw mechanisms here which were not quick and were not that
easy.

But, now they have better ones. And, these are generally made out of aluminum.
And, depending on what grade and how much you want to spend you may get thicker aluminum
which makes it heavier. These have rotating cups on ball joints. Some of them have little
spikes that will unscrew through the foot.

This one doesn't have that. So, that if you
need to be on carpet you won't have to worry about sliding or moving any. This one has
got a not a fluid head, but it tries to have a fluid head. And, with just a still camera
unless you're going to be shooting movies then you really don't need a fluid head..

Tech Tips - What is Noise In Digital Photography And How to Reduce Noise In Photos!

Hey guys Brainy Here and welcome to another
Tech Tips Video. In todays video, lets talk a bit about
cameras and more specifically, lets talk about what the term noise refers to when using
a camera. So lets get right into it. In digital photographs, noise is the
commonly-used term to describe visual distortion.

It looks similar to grain found in film photographs,
but can also look like splotches of discoloration when its really bad, and can ruin a photograph. Also, Noise tends get worse when youre
shooting in low light. In low light, there is not enough light for
a proper exposure and the longer we allow the image sensor to collect the weak signal,
the more background electrical noise it also collects. In this case the background electrical noise
may be higher than the signal.

From a technical point of view, noise is the
visual manifestation of a lower signal-to-noise ratio, which is measured in decibels. While the amount of noise that you may consider
acceptable may be different from what the someone else may accept, most professional
photographers want to see photos with at least a 30dB signal-to-noise ratio. In many cases, one camera may produce more
noise than another camera. Digital cameras convert light into electricity
and then that electricity is converted into pixels.

Each camera manufacturer uses different sensor
chips and software to handle these conversions. As such, some cameras are better at reducing
noise than others. In addition to software, the size of the sensor
itself and the number of pixels on that sensor can affect the amount of noise and how big
the flecks are when noise does occur. So, now that we kinda have a basic understanding
of what noise is, how can we reduce the amount of noise in our photos?? Well, you can Shoot at a low ISO, Get a camera
with a larger sensor, Use your cameras on-board noise-reduction or Use noise-reduction
software on your computer.

Now those are just a few methods you can use
but the main goal here is that you use what works best for you to reduce the level of
noise in your photos. And yeah, thats about if for this quick
Tech Tips video. If you want more feel free to smash that like
button down below, and also subscribe for more Tech Tips Videos!! Also, you can get more information about Camera
Noise using the links provided below and also use the links below to get to my previous
videos!! So, thanks for watching, leave a comment stating
what you think about this video and should I do more like this?? With that being said, Ill see you in the
next video..

Sony A5100The Best Deal In Photography

Hey, everybody Ted Forbes welcome back to the art of photography today We're talking about [sony], and I want to share with you guys the sony A 5100 [this] is an amazing little camera this is in the sony alpha Line which includes the A6000 which has got a lot of hype recently and it's a very popular camera model this one is slightly newer it has a few things that the A6000 doesn't even have yet which I'm sure will be replaced in the coming months as sony likes to pop out a camera every week I think these days, but anyway, I really like this lineup And this is an evolution from the sony nex line And so the nex line was kind of this first generation And included several models at different price ranges there was the nex three the nex [5] the 6 and the 7 and I had several of these and the nex 5 was always one of my favorites And I had one for about two years Wore it out and recently was going to replace it and
I couldn't believe the price point on these it really hadn't gone up much since it was the same kind of deal that the nex 5 was and the cool thing about these cameras is they sit somewhere design-wise between a compact Point-And-shoot and The larger full-frame mirrorless cameras or maybe a dSLr sized and I think that's really cool. I mean you They're not going to be a compact in the sense like the RX100 where you could throw in your pocket and go But it's a little bit bigger. It still takes up very little space You can travel light then take up a lot of room [in] your camera bag And it has interchangeable lenses so as long as I can find an adapter that sony E-Mount and I have several other email cameras So I can use my adapters with all of them that this works just fine, and I really like that they excel very much in Doing video doing still photography and being able to flip back and forth and do kind of hybrid stuff And so they're not perfect but I do think they're Incredible when you consider the price point and let's go up and close on this because I want to show you kind of some of The features and why I think the the sony A5100 [is] so cool. So come on over let's have a look okay So we're gonna have a look at the sony a 5100 and just as a point of reference for comparison This is my older nex 5 which, I absolutely loved I did a lot of B-roll for video on this I [loved] the fact that it was a small camera could throw on the bag it easily does still photos and it was great for The time you can see that.

They're very similar in design I do have a lens on the 5100 here, so it's going to look a little bigger But this one does not have a lens Lenses are interchangeable on both they've redesigned the body very slightly It's got a different texture on it now [big] deal [and] there's a couple other differences that I'll show you in a second the a 5100 actually has a pop-up flash in it Which is very cool the nex five you had to get an external flash and plug it into this proprietary adapter when that great? Other big differences, they're both aps-C sized sensors but it's been upgraded in megapixel count so the nex 5 was 16 megapixels the a 5100 is 24 megapixels so you do have a bit of an image upgrade there? The bigger upgrade that I think is absolutely fantastic as the autofocus system has been completely overhauled you have a lot more versatility with it [autofocus] was okay [too] kind of frustrating at [times] with the nex And the whole reason I got into the nex 5 is that I could use manual focus lenses so Auto focus wasn't even a concern of mine, but now if you've ever used the sony A6000 the autofocus is very similar in there. It's got a very wide range. It does a lot of wonderful things with continuous Autofocus That you can't do on [a] dSLr even and these cameras are real small very inexpensive affordable And I really recommend these over dsLrs depending on what your price point is and what your budget is and all that stuff So that's that's one thing that is considerably different the knob placements a little bit different on these two cameras There are several kit lens as well. This is the kit [lens].

They sell with it I have another kit lens that came with the nex six I think back in [the] day And I have that which I normally [use] and this one is designed more like a video lens which [is] weird But the on/off switch has changed on the top. It's very easy to get to And let me pull the Viewfinder up so you can see this other switch does the zooming for you? And it's a little strange to do on a still camera [that] works pretty well for video I don't [do] a lot right to dial it in if you're doing street photography or event photography or something like this it's not going to be more the most versatile thing in the world so what I would [recommend] actually is you use if you need a zoom lens is Use something else that sony makes that has a collar where you can just adjust that Because I think this is just a little bit cumbersome when you get into that not a big deal though because I can take this lens off and put whatever I want on it But you do have McKenna digital zoom on there if you do that Other upgrades that this has I think one of the biggest ones that I'm really excited about Open the menu here. So you can see is that the video capabilities on here the file format? We've talked about this a little bit with the RX100 But Sony has new format in these cameras which is this A... Excuse me the XAVCS format which is an MP4 container, but it allows you to getting much higher bitrate than the older MP4 standard or the AVCHD, and so you can get up to 50 megabits a second I think is what I think it shoots at, which is pretty amazing you do need to have a high capacity card and Speaking of the card has been moved away from the battery slot and on to the side it was under the battery slot [now] [and] so you just pop it in and out from the side [you] know not a huge difference just different I'm always reaching for it in the battery slot because it's what I'm used to But anyway when you get in the menu system You can select that the other cool thing about this too is for your record settings I can get all the way up to 60 p on this so depending on what you'd like to shoot with [I] don't like 60 p for standard shooting I shoot all these videos in 24 P because a Cinematic look and when you get up to the higher ones that tend to look like cheap TV? But what's really useful about those is if you're shooting at 60 p if you want to do what they call over cranking when you're Shooting video is that then you can slow that back down to 24 p and you have slow motion so it's pretty nice to Be able to do that The other cool thing in this camera is you can do something called dual video? Recording and you can do this in a lot of the the higher-end sony cameras now where it will basically record two videos it does A smaller one so if you want to move that over to your [smartphone] and upload to instagram or something crazy like that Or just use it as a proof you can do that.

So it'll record both formats at the same time I don't typically use that but it is there The other cool thing is in the manual focus mode you do have focus peaking and you will set magnification Which is really nice and I did a separate video on that where we use the a7 s so if you're interested in using Manual focus lenses with mirrorless cameras I would recommend you go check that out I'll link it up at the end of this, but anyway it did cover some of that anyway It's a great little camera the image quality is fantastic. I noticed the most upgrade when I was doing video work stills look looked really good on the anti X5, but the video is noticeably better on the outside the a 5100 in a major way it really looks outstanding as I mentioned also it has a pop-up flash Which you know it's not the greatest thing in the world But what is cool is just like some of the other sony cameras you can angle this with your finger and bounce the flash So it does give you a little bit of versatility if you're in a situation where you need [some] kind of flash And [you] don't have one it is a flash that you can control and hold up and bounce if you want So I thought that was a really nice design feature the other interesting thing about this They don't want to talk about is they have added now touch capabilities, so this is actually a touchscreen now It's a little bit limited [in] what you can do but what you can do is very useful and you can see this little box already and hope you can pick that up on the Video [I] can touch the screen anywhere And it will select that [as] what I want to be in focus And so for instance if I have something extreme in the foreground like this other nex camera I can just touch the focus and it will make sure that stays in focus And it will track it as well and the tracking is good it's smooth when you watch the video playback If that's what you're using it for it works great looks awesome You don't see it hunting and seeking trying to find the focus Which is really nice, and it works great for stills too. If you're in a [situation] where you're shooting something That's moving like kids or sports or something like that And you want to be able to use the touch screen? Now the touch screen really only does that it will not work in the menu system [you] know a lot of people that's kind of a deal [breaker] for but I can't for instance Flipping the menus and scroll or anything doing the touch screen just doesn't work for that. It's [ok] for me It's not a deal [breaker] I'm glad that it does have a touch screen to do focus with because my RX100 my compact doesn't even do that It's a handy feature to have when you're out and about Also, the other thing I want to mention is the screen it's a it's a nice looking screen but it is just that a screen, so if you're going to be shooting outdoors for video or still work it gets a little hard to see depending on how bright the sunlight is and Just depends on what time of day you're shooting and all that and there is no room on here to put an oled Viewfinder so if you want an eye level Viewfinder You're just kind of out of luck if you're doing video.

You can use something like I've got one of the Saku toe focus finders so you can use something like that if that helps other than that that is the one major drawback to this over something like the [Innie] or sorry a 6,000 is that you don't have a [high-level] finder on it, and so that's just kind of part of the deal And it's just the design of these cameras, but however you can flip this up And you know in every whatever they call selfie mode here I actually find this very useful particularly if I'm doing video and I don't want to bring a lot of stuff and I'm out in the field and so or if I'm even Filming this show a lot [of] times I use [a] little flip up Viewfinder so I can see if I'm in frame or not So it's very useful for that It's also very useful if you're filming someone else And they need a monitor and want to be able to kind of see themselves, or what they're doing it. You've got it you don't [have] to bring an external monitor to do that with if that's a big deal for me because I do the The show and the way I film it that that's enormous Ly useful to have the other bizarre function on here when you actually flip the screen up like this And you'll love this if I just touch the screen [it] goes into this weird selfie mode so you can see [it] counting down [three] [two] [one] and then takes a picture [I] Guess that's useful for people who really like selfies sure you get a little timer there's another bizarre function in here that you can go into and you can [actually] set it so a smile will trip the shutter and I've seen other cameras that dumb have done this and this one does seem to work you have to have teeth in your smile So you have to open your mouth a little bit But it's weird [and] I keep waiting for a contemporary artist to come along and do some bizarre project of Something where people are tripping the shutter with teeth or something. I don't know anyway, but it is there It's not a huge deal [and] it's kind of activated when you have the screen flipped up in the selfie mode like that when you're down here you use the touch it functions as that autofocus, so Anyway, very nice camera, though And I think the biggest deals for me on here are the x ABc s video Codec the redesign sensor? Which is noticeably better than what we had before on the nex [5]. It's really really good guys.

[It's] Actually a hair better than my really expensive video camera, and I just think it's beautiful video looks wonderful You have [a] lot of versatility with it I love the light weight the compact size the fact I can detach the lens and put a manual focus lens on there You know some of the minuses. I like the flash [too] when you're in a jam Need to use that the biggest minus is the screen and just the way that [this] camera is designed I mean, it's hard to see when you're [in] bright sunlight [I] don't shoot in that situation a lot but when you do It's kind of hard See things you kind of have to squint and cover it and shade it and do weird things to make that work But you know the control layout is good. [I] can get to things pretty easily and I think for a [500] [dollar] camera You're getting so much bang for your buck on this. It's just ridiculous the one last thing I want to talk about is [low-light] capabilities on this you know does it compare to something like the A7 s well, no the a7 s is one of the most interesting Sensors in a camera you can find in the low-light is just I mean you can shoot in the dark on that thing with very Little noise.

This is [going] to start to get noisy. You can shoot 1600 iso Fine when you get up to 3200 start getting a little noisy That's usable and especially if you're using manual focus lenses that have really wide apertures like a 1.8 Or 1.4 Or something like that you can get around that sorry just shut itself off But you know I think Considering that may not you know the low-light capabilities are not why you buy this camera it's got a lot [of] other reasons for why you would want to buy this camera [and] As I mentioned I had the nex 5 and I used this just into the ground I mean, I spent two years with this camera. It went on every trip I went on it was the camera that just thrown in my bag when I needed to film video or whatever I've used it on the show before extensively, [I] just absolutely [loved] this camera for stills and video and mine starting to wear out [a] little bit and it was kind of time to put it out to pasture and get something I could rely on a little more just because I really Did use the use the bejesus out of this so anyway? I think the a 51,000 I wish they'd come up more confusing names [release] a [5100] is an Excellent buy for five hundred dollars and I'll link up in the show notes the store You can get one I want to take a second give a shout-out to our sponsor today who the awesome folks over at squarespace.Com? If you're not familiar with squarespace [comm] it is everything you need to build a beautiful website Portfolio online store You name it and come over to the computer I want to show you how this works if you look at squarespace's website You can browse the first thing you want to do and this is what's so awesome with Squarespace Is that you sign up for a free trial? And you start by browsing their templates here and let's say [that] I go through here And I pick a template [that] looks really nice And [I] want to use this and so let's view adversary And I'm going to go [ahead] and do a live preview this and it's going to open it up And you're going [to] see exactly how this looks and this one's got a lot [of] cool things with Parallax scrolling Going on. It's really nice, and so let's say I want to start here I want to build my photography portfolio or want to do something with that and so you sign up for the free trial? Go ahead and get started with the template and then you can go in and you can pick your fonts and your colors and your Layout schemes and you pages, and how you want the whole thing to fit together? And what's what's really cool about squarespace is even though We all kind of start from templates [everything] is customizable [if] you do your own coding and you want to inject something in there They have code injection too.

So you're never really boxed in with Squarespace, and what's really cool Is that you also don't get painted into a corner as your website grow, so if you want to offer ecommerce Or if you want to sell items on here products or prints or digital downloads or whatever that may be you [can] do That's through squarespace, and it is awesome. You just turn on the features and you go it's a monthly price That's about [eep] as they start at [8] dollars a month And squarespace really are the easiest solution out there that's all-in-one for hosting and building your own website And they have a deal right now for artificial Feelers if you're interested I can save you money what you want to do is head over to squarespace comm and sign up for the free trial and On Checkout use offer code aop that's going to save you 10% off your order that once again is offer code aop for the art of photography And that'll get you 10% off so go over there and try it now they don't require a credit card or anything just go over And check it out and see what squarespace will do for you And I want to give an extra special shout out And thank you once again to the awesome folks over at squarespace for once again sponsoring another episode of the art of photography So that my friends is the sony a 5100 and [I] think this is such an excellent camera for the money You're going to spend on something like this if you're in the market [to] get something you don't have a lot of money and you Want something that's going to get really good image quality really good video quality Have the ability to be able to put manual focus lenses on here, and it's got some versatility to it [I] really recommend this series particularly the a 5100 the A6000 is a great camera [too] in my humble opinion I think the video is [just] slightly better on here And I mean splitting hairs really because they're both wonderful cameras this one is also considerably cheaper So I will link up to where you can find these in the show notes and I strongly recommend that you check these out as Always if you enjoyed this episode remember to like it and share it with your friends and as always subscribe So you'll be up to date all [the] latest and greatest videos as they come [out] I'm doing a ton of stuff and if you want to stay up to [date] subscribe, so you will never miss an episode Anyways always folks that's been another episode of the art of photography. [I'll] see you guys in the next video [later] you.

Skyrim Screen Archery and Digital Photography

What's good.. It's Fevir. Today I want to share with you a facet of
the Skyrim community that is pretty incredible- but in a different way than when I went over
what I personally find compelling about the act of modding.. As for that I'm part of it
and felt confident speakin to it..

For this I'm on the outside looking in... But this
is just another way Skyrim has been able to remain relevant since it's release with people. In this video we're going to dive into the
realm of screen shotting. I'll start showing off some screenshots that
people have taken from Skyrim..

And if you're anything like me. Any screenshot you've ever taken of any game..
Doesn't look like any of these. I've had those moments where I think I'm taking
a great screenshot as many people have had.. Usually images of the landscape..

Or the light
hitting trees or god ray anything.. Where I'm feeling hela artistic.. And those are
alright.. But these are on another level.

Now I understand screenshots are taken for
many different reasons.. In this video I'm mainly speaking to the artistic side. Now I found these images.. Randomly on a Flickr
account..

Don't ask me why I was on that website.. And it was filled with some of the shots you've
been seeing... And while generally I don't care about screenshots.. Reddit and forums
and friends- people always try to share them and I thought I had become numb to them..

Sort of like vacation or baby pictures.. Who
cares... But there was something about these shots.. Where I ended up spending quite a
bit of time looking through albums and albums from the same uploader..

Than branching out
to see if other people took shots like this.. And they did. In fact a lot of people collect and hunt for
great screenshots.. In the same way photographers do.

And I think that is almost the distinction
here- these screenshots are a respectable type of video game photography- digital photography. And there are players who have these archives
of screenshots from every game they've played- where finding good shots is just another way
they enjoy and interact with games the same way as people like to achievement hunt or
collect one of everything or 100% a game. And what I found interesting outside of just
some screenshots from tons of other games.. Is that the ones for Skyrim and to a lesser
extent- other Bethesda games..

Seemed to look better but also had much more variation. The reason for this.. Is that taking screenshots
in a video game is weirdly similar to taking pictures in real life. You have a lot of control over how you take
the image..

And what you take an image of.. But you're hoping to capture something.. And
most games are limited in what you can capture.. Whether that's a comment on the amount of
characters, events or just the size and scope of the game...

And Skyrim offers the same.. But the engine allows
you to take it a step further.. And not only gives you more control over how you take a
picture.. But also gives you control of what you take a picture of.

Generally when you take screenshot in a game
you have control over the viewpoint and camera that is attached to your character.. So you
are restricted in a sense to what and where your character can be. But in Skyrim.. Those restrictions don't exist.

You can detach your camera from your character..
You can ignore the games physics and fly around and through objects to find vantage points
and angles you couldn't otherwise.. You could take a shot of something that's happening
far away from you. You can stop time.. Speed up time..

Change
the lighting.. The weather.. Mod in new textures.. New animations..

Fog.. But also.. Add, remove,
replace... Anything you want.

The depth of the mod scene is also at your
fingertips and if you want to instead of shooting dragons.. Why not shoot the avengers.. You
can. The amount of freedom and control you have
is incredible.

Not to mention ENBs and their in-game configuration
that allows you to do a lot of what you might do in photoshop.. In game. In fact a lot of the images you're seeing
weren't touched up in photoshop.. That's what it looks like playable in game..

Quick aside-
most of these are from a modded Classic Skyrim. And that level of control.. Allows someone
to create, stage or force things to capture.. Limited only by your creativity.

Sometimes this ends up looking like someone
playing with digital dolls playing dress up.. Sometimes they are trying to show off a cool
character or relay an emotion.. Sometimes documenting a story.. Or they were inspired
and are highlighting an item..

A place.. A mod.. Something. And then times it's just a good image.

But because of the ability to basically create
your our set to do a photoshoot.. Skyrim works as a stage.. To get people to
play Skyrim.. Without actually playing Skyrim..

In a way the developer's probably never saw
coming. And maybe.. This doesn't impress you the way
it impresses me. I was just blown away to find this community
of people that I didn't even really know existed..

And they take this stuff very seriously..
And just the idea of playing a game and constantly being on the lookout for a shot that conveys
an emotion or a story and trying to capture it.. Just parallels real photography in a
way.. Even though it's 'just' happening in a game... And it all just impresses the hell
out of me..

When done well. ..Because I've seen both ends of the spectrum.. I have a respect for the ability.. Or the
skill..

Required to create that image.. Not sure how else to word that. And in a weird way has given me a stronger
overall appreciation.. For all forms of static imagery..

Or even just the thought that goes
into a single image. Some people might have felt this way and come
to that realization.. After seeing a certain painting.. Or examiming architecture and the
lines of an interesting building or appreciated deep and meaningful lyrics to a song or poem.

But me.. Nerd at heart. I needed to see some cool screenshots of a
dragon. I'm hopeless.

That's going to do it for me. Until next time.. This is Fevir..

Six quick tips to improve your digital photography

For chapter one in my book Stunning Digital Photography, I want to go over some quick tips that can really quickly improve your
photography. I'm going to use my favorite model here, Cowboy. The first tip that I have is that I
don't carry a camera bag around nor do I use a lens cap. You see all I have is a camera strap When you carry all that extra gear it
just slows you down.

Every time you go to take a picture you have to spend a few seconds taking your camera
out, maybe digging through all those different lenses. So here's tip number two, and it's to
eliminate distractions so this is how most people would take a
picture. They would just stand at eye level and take a nice wide angle shot. Nice smile, Cowboy.

And what happens there is,  you don't really know what
the subject to the picture is, it looks fine when you're seeing it with your eye. But when you look at the actual photo, you
see a lot of things in the picture besides the
subject. To eliminate distractions, the easiest thing to do is to get closer and to zoom
in. So I'll do that now.

Cowboy, look up here. Good boy! Getting closer also reduces the depth of field, it blurs the
background a little bit which I cover in depth in Chapter four. The next thing to do, tip
number three is to try different viewpoints. So, I just shot Cowboy from eye level and it's not that flattering.

For smaller
subjects like dogs, you really wanna crouch down and get to the eye level same thing applies for kids. Good boy,
Cowboy. If you're taking pictures of something like
the Eiffel Tower, you can move to many different sides of it get high and get low, get close, zoom in
zoom out that leads me to tip number four which
is take lots og pictures but delete most at them. You can't take too
many pictures with digital, it doesn't cost you a thing but please don't put 150 pictures of the
same thing on Facebook.

Just pick one. For tip number 5 I would
like to talk about flash. Now by default your camera  just points the
flash directly at your subject which provides a very flat lighting I'll take a sample shot now. A better way to
do it is to use bounce flash.

Many cameras allow you to attach an
external flash to the hot shoe With the bounce flash you can angle the
flash up. Many bounce flashes even have a diffuser built in that will spread the
light a little bit more evenly. Now as I take a second picture of Cowboy you'll notice that the lighting is very different the background has more even shadows, the lighting overall looks more natural And if he had red eye in the first
picture, he wouldn't have red eye in this picture For my last tip, I want to suggest that you edit your photos. All you need to do is
to download a free application like Picasa and just give it a little crop, maybe adjust
the colors and the white balance until looks good Often the application can edit the
settings automatically This was for  chapter one in my book
stunning digital photography this was the most basic video and
chapter in the series after this it gets much more complex I can take you from beginner to
very advanced amateur or even professional if you're willing to put the
time into it.

The print book is about twenty dollars. If you get the ebook which is just a few dollars, you should be able to watch videos like this embedded right in it, many videos
which you can't find on YouTube or other sources. If you like this video
click subscribe above to see other videos like it and click like down below. If you have any questions
for me add them to the comments below I'll get
right back to you.

Thanks. High five Cowboy! Alright! [Background laughter].

Raw vs JPEG Real-world photography examples, advantages and disadvantages

Hi, I'm Tony Northrup, and for the book Stunning Digital Photography I'd like to talk about raw files. Raw
files take all the data captured by your camera sensor
and put it into a really big file that you can process later.
Now that's distinct from a jpeg file. If you use jpeg files,
your camera takes all that raw data and processes
it in camera and then you get to work with that
processed file. Now you might notice that a jpeg file tends to be about three
megabytes, whereas a raw file might be 25 megabytes.

The difference is important.
The raw file's giving you way way way more data. In fact,
it's giving every bit of data that the sensor captures. The jpeg file drops an awful lot of that data. Your jpeg pictures might still look good,
but they don't have all the data in them.

For example a raw file will capture, let's say, 10,000 different bits, different gradients, from black to white and it will store them all. When you
save it as a jpeg file, it has to clip the top and bottom part of that. It clips some the shadows and some of the
highlights and that means you're losing detail. To demonstrate that, let's look at
some jpeg files and raw files in my photo editing app, Lightroom.

Here I have a picture of a train shot in both raw and jpeg. And you can see that this is a pretty
challenging scenario, I'm shooting directly into the sun here. I'll switch over to the develop module and
try to recover some of the highlights. You can see I am able to retrieve some of the information.

Now let's look at the RAW file instead. Now, you can see how much more information I
was able to recover there. I was able to see quite a bit more of the
train in that one than in here. You can see
how much more that sunburst covers up.

Now I'll switch over to the raw file one more
time and bring up the shadows a little bit. And
you can see that I'm able to get a much clearer picture from the raw file than I could from the
jpeg file. Another good use for raw files is white
balance. In this night shot of the Brooklyn bridge you can see the white balance is
terrible.

With a jpeg file you can adjust the white
balance, but it's not quite as perfect because your camera has already decided
upon the white balance in camera and set that permanently for
you. With a raw file, you have quite a bit
more flexibility and you don't have to worry about any data loss, so you can fix the white balance and you will still retain perfect detail
as if you had set the white balance correctly in the first place. Of course it's always ideal, but you don't have to make those decisions at the time you're shooting with a raw file. You get to make those decisions later.

Which means, if you happent to make a mistake or if the lighting situation is such that it
would be impossible to pick one right answer, you can fix it in post as long as you
shoot RAW. This gives you more power later on. Let's look at a couple more examples. This is Shibuyo station in Tokyo, Japan and it's the busiest intersection in the world.

Which means I
couldn't necessarily bracket shots, because you can see just how much
movement there is here. So HDR wouldn't work to capture this
huge dynamic range between the darks and the blown-out highlights here. You know, look at the sign up here and you can see you can't read those words at all, this is completely white. With raw, I
can drag these highlights down and suddenly the sign is completely
readable.

Take a look at this area of the sign over here and how much is lost versus how much can be recovered. Now I'll switch over to the jpeg file and we'll
look at the same blue sign up here. I'll try to recover the highlights and you'll
see it's just not as good. Do a before and after with the raw file.
That's the raw file, and that's the jpeg file.

Once again the
raw file shows far more detail and the jpeg just has
more and more blown out. Here is another example, this is a sunset shot of the Boston skyline, and you can see it's at dusk but the sky is completely blown out. This is actually a great exposure for a night shot because I'm capturing all the detail in the shadows
here and if it were a jpeg the shot would just be a loss. But with a raw file I can drag those
highlights down and you can just see a ton of detail
in the sky.

You can see even though the sky looked over-exposed
initially there's absolutely no detail lost. Lot's of dust here, but you can see these
wispy clouds. Now let me switch over to the jpeg file
and I'll drop the exposure down to recover the highlights, and you can see
what happens. There's a little bit of detail that can be
recovered but you see these terrible lines up here.

Switching back to the raw file just
looks so much better. Here's another high dynamic range situation, this one in the day. You can see this ruin in Ireland is completely in shadow
because you have these overcast skies here. But there's a great
deal of detail in both the shadows and the highlights here.

So, with the raw file I can drag up these shadows and drag down these highlights and just overall reduce the contrast of it. Now, let me pull the blues down a little bit to show some more detail in the sky. And, wow, that's just a lot of detail that
was recovered in that picture. Now let's take a look at the jpeg file.

That's the jpeg file... And this is the
raw file edited. Now I can try to do that same
editing here in the jpeg file. And you can see I'm able
to recover some of it drag the blues down.

You can see after processing the
raw file just looks much much better. Because you have all that extra
information. When you choose jpeg files, your camera
processes that in the camera and just throws away that information forever. When you pick raw, you can always go back and save it and you have all the detail that your camera sensor
was able to capture.

Wildlife shots can be really challenging because you don't necessarily get to make adjustments and shoot later. Here I saw this ibis flying and I had to
captured it with whatever settings I had, I didn't get to take a picture and then look at my
settings and think about it. And I did a pretty good job but you can see it's a little bit
underexposed. That the detail that we wanna see are these gorgeous colors in the bird's wings and in a jpeg file, that
would be lost.

But, look here in the raw file and you'll see that we can recover a great deal of detail in this picture.
I'll drag the exposure up and pull these shadows up and you'll see what happens. Now that's just amazing, you can see all this
metallic color in this ibis, just really beautiful. And with a jpeg
file all that would be lost. Here is a little more extreme example, this osprey had caught a fish but because the sky was overcast it's
completely blown out and he's completely in shadow.

Now, here's an answer- wait around for
better lighting, right? But you don't always necissarily wanna waste
a whole day of shooting because I had bad weather that day. But with raw, this
file can be recovered. So the first thing I'll do is pull the
highlights down to recover some blue in the sky and then I'll just drag
the shadows up some. Pull the exposure up a little until the
bird is well exposed.

Some more shadows and then drop the blacks down And you can see I ended up with a pretty
good picture Another wildlife picture. I shot this flycatcher at sunset and it was just beautiful. And the lighting is
beautiful, you can see, because the reeds are backlit, that they're kind of glowing.
With wildlife usually want the subject to be front-lit, but I wouldn't have had the
beautiful lighting on the reeds if I did that. With raw, however, I can expose it properly
for the reeds and then recover so much of the shadow detail that you'll be able
to see the bird nicely.

So I'll pull up the shadows here bump the exposure up just a little bit and you can see it ended up being just really nice picture. So I hope
you'll check your camera's manual and learn how to turn on raw files for it. There are a few disadvantages that you
should know about. Raw files are way bigger and that's where the
disadvantages come from.

You can fit fewer pictures on a single memory
card, so you are going to need bigger memory cards or more of them. You fun out of buffer faster, so if you're, say,
shooting wildlife or sports and you're holding down that shutter on continuous you might find that you run out of buffer
in six or seven pictures. It depends on the camera, but after you run out of buffer the number of pictures you can take is gonna slow down a lot. Like it's gonna go from being 4 or 5 pictures a second to one picture a
second.

So if you find that you're running out of buffer all the time, it might be better to switch back to jpeg. It also takes up a lot more disk space. If you take thousands of pictures a week
you could find yourself buying a new hard drive pretty soon, but nowadays hard
drives are so cheap I say go for raw, delete the pictures you
don't need and you probably won't have any problem with that at all. If you liked this video, please click
subscribe up above and like down below.

And I hope that you'll check out my
book, Stunning Digital Photography, which has more than two hours of
instructional video. It focuses on photographic technique, so you'll learn
how to get the picture right in camera but I also show you all the advantages
of using raw in different scenarios including for night photography and HDR. Thanks..

Physics 109, Lab 12 Digital Photography

In this lab we will investigate a typical
modern point and shoot digital camera to see how it works.
The camera you will be using is Canon G7, a point and shoot camera which can be controlled
from the computer. In particular you will learn about focus,
exposure time, aperture and ISO. In automatic mode a digital camera will choose
these settings for you, but if you want to take creative photographs, you have to know
how to choose them yourself In digital cameras , the image sensor is a
charge-coupled device, or "CCD" . When the sensor is exposed to light, the charge
distribution changes.

This new charge distribution is then read
off and processed into an image. Whereas in film camera, the image is formed
on a film which is a length of plastic that has been coated with certain chemicals. When
a picture is taken, the film is exposed to light in a controlled manner, using lenses,
an aperture and shutter. To begin the lab
Switch on the camera and connect to the computer.

Then open up the zoombrowser ex software that
you will use to control the camera. Click on acquire and camera settings and then connect
to camera. Then select the remote shooting tab and click start remote shooting.
Select the folder where to save the images. The camera is now connected and you can set
the camera settings.

Set the ISO to 400 AE. Mode to manual, exposure time which is referred
to as Tv in zoombrowser to 1/50 and aperture that is Av to 4.5. Then press release to grab
a picture. You can then zoom into the picture to see the pixels
us the slider on the upper left of the window to zoom in and out.
Zoom in until you can see the pixels, and out again until you cant see the pixels
any more You can also check the image size by checking
the properties panel.

When you change the focus on the camera, you
are changing the "image distance"- the distance from the lens to the image sensor-- while
leaving the focal length the same. This is done by moving the lens relative to the sensor.
If the image distance is changed, but the focal length is not, this has the same effect
as changing the object distance . You can see this in the lens equation. If f is constant
then the left hand side of equation should remain the same that means if either i or
o is varied the other one has to change to get a proper image in focus.

Increasing the distance between the lens and
the real image actually increases the total size of the real image.
The same basic thing happens in a camera. As the distance between the lens and the real
image increases, the light beams spread out more, forming a larger real image. Here you can see the camera changing the image
distance by moving the lens away from the sensor. In this section you will test the exposure
time, using the light-emitting diode(LED), and an audio generator.

Begin by setting the
frequency of the audio generator to 10HZ. Set the exposure time to 1/10 of a second
and ISO to 100. Take pictures of the diode, with different values of exposure time and
by changing the frequency of flashes accordingly. The number of bright dots varies with different
settings of frequency and different values of exposure time.

In these photographs, the
exposure time set to 1/10 of a second, the red led is on frequency 10hz, green one on
20Hz and yellow on 30 hz, that is why only one red dot is visible whereas there are two
and three green dots. The aperture of a camera is the hole through
which light has to pass in order for a picture to be made. The bigger the aperture, the more
light gets in, and the brighter is the image captured.
Here, you can observe the changing aperture by looking at the center of the lens. Next we come to ISO.

ISO controls the sensitivity
of the image sensor to light. The higher the ISO number, the more sensitive the camera
is. In this photo the graininess is caused due to a high iso number. Whereas this is
a photo of the same object with lower iso number.

Next we study the relation between aperture
and depth of field. First place a notebook 20 cm in front of the camera and lock the
auto focus, then set the aperture to 8 and exposure to 1/10 of a second. Then change
the aperture to 2.8 And exposure to 1/80 and take another photograph. You will observe
that the photograph with small has a larger depth of field as compared to the one with
bigger aperture..

Photoshop Tutorial How to Create a Digital Portrait from a Photo

Hi. This is Marty from Blue Lightning TV.
I'm going to show you how to create a digital portrait from a standard photo and how to
replace the photo without having to redo the effects. This is an update to a tutorial I
did on an earlier version of Photoshop.  Open a photo you'd like to use, I downloaded this one from Shutterstock.Com.

To add effects to the photo non-destructively, convert it
into a Smart Object. To do this, click the icon at the upper, right of the Layers panel
and click "Convert to Smart Object".  Go to Image and Image Size. To ensure that your results will be the same as mine, make the Resolution: 150 pixels per inch and the Height:
850 pixels.

The Width will automatically update itself to another amount because the width
and the height are linked. Then, click OK. To fit the photo back onto your canvas, press
Ctrl or Cmd + 0. For the best results, the subject should be on a white background.

If
your subject isn't on a white background, we need to make a selection around the subject
and then cut it out. For this example, I'll use the Quick Selection Tool. I'll make the
Size: 15 pixels and drag the tool over the subject. The selection doesn't have to be
perfect.

If you want to see it as a quick mask, press "Q". Press "Q" again to revert
it back into a selection.  Press Ctrl or Cmd + J to cut your subject from its background and copy it to its own layer.  Make a new layer below it.

To do this, Ctrl-click or Cmd-click on the New Layer icon. We'll fill the empty layer with white and since white is the background color, press Ctrl or Cmd + Delete. Merge these layers by clicking on the thumbnail of your subject to make the layer active and pressing Ctrl or Cmd + E. Make this layer into a Smart Object  and go to Filter, Pixelate and Mosaic.

Make the Cell Size: 15 pixels square and click OK.  Go to Filter, Noise and Median.  Make the Radius 5 pixels.  This modifies the square mosaics into round shapes.

Go to Filter and Filter Gallery.  Open the "Stylize" folder and click "Glowing Edges". I'll make the Edge Width: 1, the Edge Brightness: 15 and the
Smoothness: 15, however, feel free to experiment with the amounts to get the combination you
like. To replace the photo with another without having to redo all the effects, double-click
on a Smart Object to open the source photo.

Open the new photo and go to Image and Image
Size. Make the Resolution: 150 pixels per inch and Height: 850 pixels. Then, click OK.  Press "v" to open your Move Tool and drag it onto the tab of the .Psb file, which is
the Smart Object.

Without releasing your mouse or pen, press and hold Shift as you drag it
down onto the image. Then, release.  Go back to the Smart Object tab and click the small "x" to close it.  When you see this warning, click "Yes" to accept it.

Click back on the tab of your portrait to open it and your new photo will automatically update itself with
all the effects. To crop it, open your Rectangular Marquee Tool and drag a rectangle over you image.  Go to Image and Crop. Then, deselect it.

This is Marty from Blue Lightning TV.
Thanks for watching!.

Photography Tutorial, Essential Skills, Quickly Transform Your Photos, by Karl Taylor

Light is the magical stuff that we use
to create our pictures. It's found all around us and comes from a variety of
sources both natural and man-made. It also comes in many forms and colours, each
one affecting the atmosphere of our pictures differently. To help us
understand light I've broken it down into four main categories: transmitted
light, reflected light, soft light and hard light.

Hard light comes from any
light source that is apparently small. Now the sun on a clear day is a prime
example. Now we know the sun's not actually small but it appears small
because it's so far away and it acts like an extremely bright but small light
bulb in the sky. Soft light comes from any light source that has a large
apparent surface area.

Now a great example of that is like the light we've
got right now and that's where the sun is shining through an overcast sky or a
large blanket of cloud and that large blanket of cloud has now become the
large light source and that large light source is what's giving us the soft
light. The characteristics of hard light are that it has a very high contrast
because that high contrast it gives very sharp hard-edged shadows. It also has a
certain sparkle and sharpness to the light because of the high contrast and
it also reveals texture very strongly if the light source is at the right angle,
whereas soft light is very low in contrast and hardly gives any shadows at
all. In actual fact if soft light is used
incorrectly it can look quite dull.

So what type of light is best for
photography? Well right now is what photographers call the 'Magic Hour' and
that's because it has all the magic ingredients. We've got soft light from
this large light source above us which is the sky, but we've also got hard light
from the sun which is setting over there and it's cutting through the earth's
atmosphere so it's reduced in intensity to a much more manageable level and by
combining hard light and soft light makes the photographs much more
interesting. Now to add to that we've also got transmitted light and that
means we can see the light source in the picture, plus we've got reflected light
reflecting off the surface of the water and off the wet sand and by putting all
of those things together we're going to get a fantastic image, and if I can just
get this piece of driftwood to stay still I think we're going to get the
shot that we want. That's coming together really nicely, just going to move that
over a little bit.

Some beautiful reflections off of the bit of wood, it's
a little bit too close, just going to move it back down there. I want to be
quite precise.Oh no, she moved out the way again! Oh still that's quite a good
result quite, a good result. We've got the water flowing by, got the bit of wood. As you can see sometimes you need to get
your feet wet to get the best shot.

For this shot I was using a super wide
angle lens and experimenting in manual mode with shutter speeds from one to six
seconds. I used a small aperture for maximum
depth of field. To balance the light in the sky with my dark foreground I use ND
filters, which we look at in depth in our travel and landscape DVD. To understand
light better start looking at it in different situations and try to figure
out what you are seeing - is it hard light or is it soft light or is it a
combination of the two? For the best light try to shoot at least half an hour
before and after sunset, if the weather conditions are right then this will
usually be the most attractive light of the day.

We'll try a couple more shots before we pack
home and I can change out of these wet socks and shoes. Fantastic! The 'Magic Hour' is not the only time or
light that we can shoot in. You can even take advantage of hard light at midday
by shooting indoors. I'm going to show you how you can create stunning
portraits with nothing more than a window and a reflector for lighting.

Now
a great lighting set-up that you can easily use in many different locations, even in
your own home, is simply a large window. Now here we've got Vicky modelling for us
and we're using this large window light to illuminate soft light all the way
down the side of Vicky's face. Now one of the problems when you just have side light
like this is that the other side of the body will be in shadow, now a great way
to get around that is simply to use a reflector and reflectors are great tools,
now you can get a variety of different reflectors. This one here is a
commercially available reflector that just pops open like that and you can
take out on location with you and then if you look at Vicky's face here you'll
see the difference that that reflector makes as I put that light in and out of
the shot like so, so a huge difference.

Now it's silver on one side and it's white on
the other so the silver side gives a harsher light, but if you don't want to
use a reflector like that you can even use something as simple as a piece of
white card like this, here I've got a little bit of white board, just a bit of
white foam board, and again watch the result here what we can do there. So this
side of the face is dark and in shadow, simply bring white board in and we've
got a great reflector, great fill in panel to illuminate that shadow side for
us. So very simple technique - large window, nice soft light beautiful for portraits,
fantastic for portraits, and then simply a reflector on the other side to fill in
the shadow side. So I'm going to get Vicky leaning in against this window and
then we're going to use a couple of different reflectors and we're going to
see what results we get.

Okay Vicky. That's great, come down towards me a bit more. And head over the other way, that's it. This shot uses a white reflector close
to our subject, here the reflector is further away resulting in less fill
light and more shadows.

In this shot no reflector was used at all, and in this
shot the white reflector was close to our model. That's good. Great. Okay just give me a
little hint of a smile there Vicky, that's good.

Just chuck that light there, perfect. Same
pose, that's it. The difference without the reflector and then with the
reflector, without, with. And you can see that even without the reflector can be
quite nice, in that case there's actually a little bit of light bouncing back from
the other side of the room anyway which is filling in a little bit and then on
the one with the reflector it's almost a bit too strong so I think what we do
Fab is just get you to go in with the white card this time, we'll just go from a
little bit further away.

Much softer light, which is fantastic for filling in
all those creases on Vicky's face. That's it good, okay, excellent. I'm just
going to drop that down a little bit. Okay turn your head towards the window
Vicky, that's it good keep that there.

That's lovely.
You can see from this that the surgeon is going to have to do the reconstructive work round about here and then probably shrink the nose a little bit,
expand the head, lift those out, yeah lift those out, maybe make your fingers longer,
so they they drag on the floor like an orangutan, which would probably suit you quite well but yeah. So I think it's worked out quite nicely. For the picture on the left we used a white reflector from approximately two
meters away, giving a slight fill to the shadow side of our image. For the shot on
the right the reflector was moved further away, resulting in a stronger
shadow.

Notice how in both shots I have used a
large aperture to blur the background, concentrating the attention on our
subject.