On the Neon Prowl Again...

I've been out on the prowl looking for neon signs again, hopefully to be used in a new book. It's not that easy to find great old neon where I live in Connecticut, but I've always liked this sign in a car dealer's window. I shot it while waiting for Mexican take-out food--the car place is just around the corner from the restaurant. Glad I had the camera with me. I didn't bother to unload a tripod (afraid a cop might ask why I was carrying a big tripod at night in a closed car dealership--you'd be surprised how much suspicion that draws for some crazy reason), but leaned on a handy sawhorse. I shot it with a 70-300mm Nikkor zoom (non-image-stabilized version--wish I could afford one!), but there was plenty of light: shot at IS0 640 1/160 second at f/10. There's an entire tutorial on photographing neon signs on my main site.

By the way, if you're in Connecticut or passing through, the little hole-in-the-wall restaurant is called Milford Pizza and is, oddly enough, a great Mexican restaurant--staffed by a really friendly group of Mexican cooks. It's in a small plaza a block in from the Post Road that you enter from Naugatuck Avenue (yes, by the little Devon Post Office). So that's my restaurant plug.

Here's my new book plug: My new book on Exposure, Exposure Photo Workshop is out and if you're interested in learning more about exposure, I think you'll like the book. It's got more than 300 of my photos and it will help you solve a ton of exposure problems. For under $20 it's a bargain on Amazon, too--it's nearly 350 pages and crammed with info.

Moonrise at Twilight at the Beach in the Snow: You Must Believe in Spring

The afternoon that I discovered Talia (see previous post), it was the first warm afternoon we'd had in what seemed like a century (and probably was a few months in reality) in Connecticut. It's been a tough winter. One of the things about staying indoors a lot though is that you forget how interesting (and dare I say it, pretty?) the winter world can be (especially when you're a writer that works at home). I really envy people that ski a lot (especially cross-country skiers--and I used to love cross-country skiing, so maybe next winter I'll go back to it) because they do get to see a lot of the nice side of winter. They probably hate it less.

Anyway, after I'd discovered Talia and spent an hour or so shooting photos of her (including a kind of nice series of depth of field studies that I may use in a book--provided I can get her to sign a release), I started to pack up and as always happens to me, I turned around to see a really fascinating view. It seems that whenever I'm about to leave and I'm just looking forward to putting the gear away and taking a ride, a shot pops up. Who am I to turn away? This is not a great shot in terms of composition (and I was standing on an ice field when I shot it and just hoping to keep my balance) but it had a lot of interesting exposure challenges: it was twilight, there was a full moon rising, the foreground was mostly snow and, oddly enough, there was a sunset going on behind me. Since I've been working on a book about exposure (an update of my book Exposure Photo Workshop: Develop Your Digital Photography Talent), I decided to accept the challenge. Even though I'm not crazy about the shot, I think the mix of exposure challenges was fun to play with and it looks very much as I saw it: snow and sky bathed in twilight and the warm moon rising. (The shot was made at ISO 1600, by the way, so you will see some noise in the sky--but I thought it was minimal considering the low light.)

And, interestingly, I think this shot will remind me of the day the ice broke: the day that I could finally see spring in the light of the first full moon I'd noticed all winter. I think I heard spring talking to my soul in the moonlight, saying "Remember me?" And trust me, after this winter, my soul needs spring. Yours does too, probably. So, get out, find a pretty end-of-winter scene and let winter go. Wave it goodbye and wish it well. It's less than 30 days to spring: my neighbor told me the daffodils are coming up under the snow. I haven't seen them, but I believe her.

(The photo was made with a Nikon D90 body with an 18-70mm lens and exposed 1/50 at f/4.2, ISO 1600 and exposed in RAW.)

Exposure Book #1 Bestseller on Amazon Kindle

I was happy to learn this week that my book Exposure Photo Workshop: Develop Your Digital Photography Talent was the #1 bestselling photo reference book for the Amazon Kindle. It had been flirting with the top position for several weeks, but about midweek it reached the number one spot. I'm pretty excited that it has reach such a landmark on Kindle because I think that, as much as I love "old fashioned" books (I have a house full of them) and as much as I think some of us will always want to read traditional books, I also think that e-books are fun, convenient and here to stay. By the way, even if you don't have a Kindle yet (I don't!), you can also read the book on your iPad or almost any other e-reading device. My friend Walter showed me how the exposure book looked on his iPad and I was just thrilled to see how great it looked--the color photos reproduced beautifully, even better than in the print book (and you can click them up to full-screen instantly). A great graduation gift! Of course, if you still like flipping through paper pages, you can also get the paperback version of Exposure Photo Workshop: Develop Your Digital Photography Talent. The book has 20 five-star reviews on Amazon--also very gratifying.

Keep an Eye on the Highlight Warning (Or: What Am I Doing in this Two-Bit Clip Joint and What are All of Those Flashing Lights?)

One of the questions that I hear a lot from folks that are new to digital cameras is: "Why do parts of my images flash at me when I'm reviewing photos on the LCD?" The answer is because they have inadvertently turned on the highlight warning or "clipping" warning. Clipping is a term used in digital photography that essentially means the highlights are burned out and that there is no recognizable detail in those areas. Most digital cameras (at least most DSLRs) have a feature that you can turn on or off that flashes to warn you that you have overexposed areas; typically these clipped highlights flash as small dark patches wherever there is a total loss of highlight detail.

But isn't that what the histogram is for? Yes, OK, you can also tell when you have burned out highlights by looking at your histogram for any given shot. On the histogram display what you would see is that part of the graph is butted up against the right side of the display (the right side is the highlight region), but what it won't tell you is where those areas are in the image. The highlight warning provides that information by flashing at you. This is an extremely useful feature because once highlights are blown out, there is very little chance to bring them back. In the photograph of the white ibis shown here, if you look at the top of the head (just above the eyes) you'll see that there is a patch of brilliant white that is missing all detail. I've tried bringing the detail back to that area with a combination of curves controls and highlight masking, but the detail is pretty much lost forever.

So what do you do if you get a clipping warning? The only thing you can do is to use your exposure compensation feature (or, if you're shooting in manual, reduce the exposure by using a smaller aperture or faster shutter speed) to reduce exposure. Yes, this will cause more of your image to shift to the shadow side of the histogram, making everything else proportionately darker, but it's far easier to open up shadow areas than it is to bring back lost highlights. I can bring shadow detail back in even the darkest parts of an image, but with highlights, once they're gone, they're gone. This problem is worse, of course, with subjects like the ibis that are very light in tone (skies are also a problem); clipping is not a problem with midtone objects.

The real question when you see the highlights flashing, however, is whether you really need detail in those areas. In this shot, I would say yes, I wanted detail and because I wasn't paying attention to the warnings, I lost a great shot. Had I paused for a moment to review the clipping, I I would have seen the warning and cut my exposure (possibly even using an accessory flash to compensate, being careful not to overexpose with the flash). But there are times when I've seen a clipping warning and ignored it. If you're shooting a winter landscape and a small unimportant area of white snow is flashing, for instance, you might be able to ignore it. Or if a white sailboat in a harbor is small and unimportant and it's flashing, again, you might decide to let it go.

The key thing about the highlight-warning feature is that it puts you in control of making that decision rather than just reading the bad news from the histogram after you've made your shot. If you suspect some highlights might cause problems, just shoot a test frame and turn on the warning (see your manual for instructions). If there are no warnings or if the clipped areas are not important, keep shooting. If you're getting dazzled by flashing areas, reduce the exposure. The histogram itself is a nice feature because it tells you if you have a lot of areas lost to shadow (left side) or highlights (right side) but again, it takes the highlight warning to show you were those lost highlights are precisely.

Include a Dark Foreground in Landscapes

I like landscape photos that really pop off the page, that have some element of drama that forces you take notice of them. One simple way to do that is to frame your scenes, when possible, with a dark foreground. Because the eye naturally seeks lighter areas or areas with more color, using a dark foreground helps to point the viewer to your main subject. It's easy to find dark foregrounds just by exploring a scene a bit until you find an area that is not as brilliantly lit as your main subject. In this scene I used an area of marsh grass along the riverbank that was in shadow and contrasted it with the brightly lit boats. By exposing for the brighter areas the foreground went even darker and made the frame a much bolder element. Also, I was careful to include the dark pilings on the left side of the frame to tie the foreground and middleground areas together.

Photo notes: Photographed with a Nikon D90 with a 24-120mm Nikkor zoom at 120mm (180mm in 35mm terms). Exposure was 1/125 at f/5.6. White balance: cloudy weather.

Tricky Treat: Mixing Flash and Holiday Lights with the Night Portrait Mode

The importance of Halloween (and the festive illumination to go with it) has taken on increasingly epic proportions at my house in the past few years. What started out as a few casual strands of orange lights a few years ago has now become a long (and fun) afternoon of stringing lights and decorations the week before the big day (or I should say, the big night). My girlfriend is the creative power behind it, I just supply the extension cords and the occasional rubber spider.

This year the lights looked so nice that I wanted to be sure that I had a photographic record to remember them. I shot some quick snapshots on Halloween night, but the truth is that we were so busy handing out candy (more than 100 kids showed up!) that I wasn't able to concentrate on shooting pictures. The next day though I came home from an assignment and, tired as I was, I decided to see if I could get some photos that captured the fun and color of the Halloween lights.

The problem with photographing holiday lights is that even if you shoot at twilight (which you should) while there is still some lingering daylight, if you expose for the lights, the surroundings go too dark. And, of course, if you expose for the darker areas, the lights wash out. Also, in this particular shot, I wanted to get some detail in a rubber spider that was hanging in a twig-wreath from a Japanese maple next to the front walk. I tried some existing light shots using long exposures to get the lights, but the spider just disappeared in the dark background. Then I tried some straight flash exposures using the built-in flash in the "auto" mode and the photos looked way too much like flash photos.

As an experiment, I turned to the Night Portrait exposure mode--one of several scene modes on my Nikon D90. I rarely use scene modes because I can usually find a better combination of exposure tricks on my own, but occasionally when all of my cleverness fails me I give the auto scene modes a shot. In this case the Night Portrait mode worked like a charm. The spider and wreath have just enough light so that you can see them and the colored lights look very natural.

The Night Portrait mode works best when the subject you want to hit with flash is relatively close to the camera (I was about two feet away from the wreath) and the background is dimly lit, but not black. It works great in situations like photographing friends in Times Square or on the Las Vegas Strip when you want to get good exposure on your friends' faces and still capture the mood of the ambient lights behind them. With most cameras, when you switch to this mode the flash pops up automatically (as it does with the D90) so you don't even have to remember to turn on the flash.

Whenever you're confronted with an exposure situation has you a bit baffled, give those scene modes on the exposure-mode dial a shot and see if they don't provide a simple solution. Halloween may be over, but I'll always have my rubber spider's portrait to remember it.

Compensate Flash in Bright Surroundings

OK, first I have to tell you how this photo came to be. My cat is always finding new and interesting places to sleep and it takes me a while to discover them. But recently she would disappear inside the house for a few hours and then come back with her butt and tail all wet. Then, by chance, I found out where she'd been hanging out: she had started sleeping in the bathroom sink, which had a slow drip, which explained the wetness. Turns out she likes the hot water dripping on her!

I was originally going to call this posting "Keep Your Sinks Clean" because after I had shot a few frames of her (she's a very cooperative cat when it comes to photography) I noticed that the sink needed cleaning! So I had to use Photoshop to "clone away" a few dirt spots. But she still sleeps there and I want more photos of her in the sink, so now I keep the sink spotless.

But let's return to photography tips! Because the bathroom is white and there is a big mirror behind the cat, the on-camera flash was getting fooled into underexposing the shots. The camera saw all of that bright light bouncing back and thought (rightfully so) that there was more light than there really was (especially on the cat) and so it as shutting off the flash before it had enough light. The way that TTL (though-the-lens) flash works is that when you take a flash picture, the camera measures the amount of flash actually passing through the lens and hitting the sensor. If the subject is very bright, it shuts it off before the camera actually does have enough light. In this case it was causing the sink to come out gray, not white, and the cat was far too dark.

Remember, all cameras are programmed to produce subjects of a medium gray. So even if you're photographing a white sink, the camera wants to make it gray. Normally, with average-colored subjects, the camera creates a good exposure. But with subjects like a bright beach or white snow--or a white sink--the camera gets fooled.

The solution? If you're using a flash around a very bright background, use your exposure-compensation feature to add an extra stop or stop-and-a-half (experiment to see which works better) of light. I added 1.3 stops of compensation to this shot and it kept the sink white and the cat was almost perfectly exposed. I did have to lighten the cat a bit during editing, but no where near as much as I would have without the compensation.

So, today's lesson: use exposure compensation with flash in bright surroundings--and keep the sink clean!

Time Sunsets Carefully

When it comes to creating a really great sunset photo, timing is everything. While sunsets are always pretty to watch and photograph, often being really careful with your timing will turn a good photograph into a really nice one. I prefer to shoot the sun just a few seconds before it hits the horizon because there is this added element of the sun about to disappear. So, while I will usually shoot the sunset once it begins to color the sky, I reserve a few frames for the moment when the sun is about to hit, or is just hitting, the horizon.

The funny thing is that the closer the sun gets to the horizon, the faster it appears to be setting--like all of a sudden it's in a hurry to hide. It's really important then to be sure you and your camera are ready for those last few seconds. Also, sometimes there are other objects in your composition that you have to time along with the sun. In this shot of a sailboat moving past the sunset, I wanted the sun at the horizon but, of course, wanted to catch the boat in the frame too. I kept hoping the boat would slow down because it was moving pretty quickly and the sun wasn't yet in position! Fortunately I got off this one frame with both exactly where I wanted them. If that boat had been moving a tiny bit faster though, it would have left the frame too soon.

By the way, I also look for what artists and photographers call "points of tension" in situations like this. The little gap between the hill and the horizon is a point of tension because the mind knows that something is about to happen there, even though this is just a still photo. The gap between the bow of the boat and the edge of the frame is a larger, more subtle point of tension.

Improvise When All Else Fails

A few weeks ago I was photographing a friend of mine, the great blues guitarist Jim Weider in concert. As is typical of most nightclub settings, the stage lighting was very dim and overly saturated with red lighting. It's a frustration I've been dealing with since I first started photographing concerts back in the 1960s. (Wow, is he old!)

Anyway, I spent the first hour or so of the concert trying to get sharp, well-exposed photos but I could tell that Jim was moving too fast and my shutter speeds were too low--even with the ISO cranked up to 1600 (the top speed of the Nikon D70s that I was using--but my new D90 goes much higher, thankfully). I decided to throw caution to the wind and instead of trying to get sharp photos (since I wasn't getting them anyway) to experiment with long shutter speeds and letting the action become a part of the shots. So I switched to the shutter-priority exposure mode and reduced my shutter speed to 1/2 second. Then I improvised and experimented with all sorts of camera-induced motion--I jiggled the camera, twisted it, zoomed the 70-300mm lens in and out, etc.

The shot here was made by zooming the lens from it's longest focal length to it's shortest during a half-second exposure. (See the tutorial on the night-photo techniques on my main site for detailed info on zooming.) I really love the way the lights create a wired-up atmosphere that echoes Jim's very electric blues music.

So next time the environment isn't cooperating with your photography, just blow-off your plans (and reality) and improvise--you'll be surprised how much you like the results.

Beware Specular Highlights

Taking accurate light readings is very important in getting good exposures, whether you're metering in a manual mode or your automatic meter is doing the work for you. Metering scenes of average brightness, where nothing is radically darker or brighter than the majority of tones in the scene, is fairly simple and most built-in meters do a very good job.

Problems arise when there is excessive contrast in a scene, because the dynamic range (the dark-to-light contrast range) extends beyond the camera's ability to record those tones. One type of contrast situation that all cameras have a tough time with is what's called a specular highlight. These are extremely bright spots in a scene, created by a direct reflection of the sun or some other light source (like flash reflecting in a mirror), and they cause the meter to grossly underexpose (i.e. give too little exposure) an image because they make the meter think that the entire scene is brighter than it is.

There's really no safe way to meter with a specular highlight other than to exclude it from your composition during the metering phase. In the shot here, for example, I wanted the reflection of the sun in the water, but I knew that if I metered with that spot in the frame, the whole scene would have been drastically underexposed. Instead, I took a reading from the boat and the water (which already constituted a fairly contrasty scene) while carefully excluding the bright spot in the water. Then I simply locked in that reading by holding the shutter-release button halfway down and recomposed the scene.

Beware any very bright pockets, especially around reflective surfaces, and you'll get much more consistent exposure results.

Set Shutter Priority Mode for Action

Almost all digital cameras have a shutter-priority exposure mode these days and it's a great tool if you occasionally (or frequently) shoot action subjects. (And, by the way, if you have three-year-old living in the house, that qualifies as a action subject.) As long as you have a decent amount of light this mode will almost always assure that you get sharp action photos.

The shutter-priority mode is a fully automatic exposure mode and it sets both shutter speed and aperture for you, but it gives priority to selecting the fastest shutter speed available. By setting this mode you're telling the camera that what's most important to you is freezing the action and that depth of field (near-to-far sharpness) is a secondary consideration.

You can also increase your odds of getting good action-stopping photos if you time your shots for the peak of action. To capture this shot of a teenager on a bungee ride at a carnival, for example, I watched him bounce and turn head-over-heels a few times and then, when I thought he'd reached the peak of his jumps, I shot. I worked out a pretty good timing sequence by watching him and was able to get quite a number of sharp photos of him.

Give Fog An Extra Stop of Exposure

Fog and mist add a lot of atmosphere to a photograph but they can make it a bit tricky to get the exposure just right. The problem is that both fog and mist reflect a lot of light and they fool the meter into thinking there is more light than there really is, so if you expose at what the meter says, you get an underexposed (dark) photo. The situation is really easy to solve using your exposure-compensation feature. Typically dialing in a setting of +1 stop or even +1.5 stops of exposure will give you a well-exposed fog shot.

If your camera has an automatic exposure bracketing feature you can use that to take a burst of several exposures, each at different settings. You can set the bracketing feature to automatically take a series of three (and, on some cameras, more than three) exposures in user-selectable increments ranging from 1/3 stops to 2 full stops. A typical sequence (in single stop intervals, for example) would be: -1 stop, correct exposure, +1 stop. Then you can choose the best exposure later. Bracketing is a great feature that I use often, but it works best on a tripod where you know you're getting the exact same framing for each shot.