Winter 2009 Photography Tip: Find a Big Window

When it's warm and sunny, get that camera and head outside. It's bright and beautiful... get out there! But this time of year, even with some of the gorgeous days we've had, sometimes staying inside is the order of the day. When that's the case, find a window, or better yet, a great big sliding glass door to light your photos. Even when I'm using studio flash inside and have no windows to work with, I'm thinking to myself, "make it look like window light." I'm not talking about sun coming directly in through a window here. I'm simply talking about the bright outdoors coming inside through a window. There are several great things about this kind of light and you can easily take a look and see for yourself without a camera. That's the first thing: what you see is what you get. With a flash, you can't be sure until after the photograph is made what the light looks like. With the window, just take a look; it's right there. The second


thing is that it's highly adjustable. Get really close to the window and the light is big and soft and can surround your subject in great portrait light. Move away from it and it gets smaller and more focused; this can be really dramatic but watch that you have enough light to avoid a blurry photo due to low shutter speed. The third great thing about window light is it's directionality. Very often what makes a portrait interesting (or not) is the difference between the light and shadow areas on the subject. When lighting a person with a window, you will automatically have light coming in from one direction and you can control


how it falls on your subject just by turning them towards or away from it. Most of the time you would put your subject at the window and have them face you with the light coming in from the side. But, if it was a sliding glass door, you could also open it up and photograph from outside giving you a more direct/frontal light (But it's cold out there, so maybe save that trick for a very hot summer day when you need to be in the shade). Practice by simply having someone stand at a window for you and move them around. Look at how the light changes on their face as you turn them and move them closer or further away. It's a great way to experiment with how the size and direction of a light source can effect the mood of a photograph. Play around with it. Experiment and have fun. And the next time your camera wants to automatically blast your subject with that ugly on-camera flash that you know you hate, turn it off and find a window!



ps: These three photos were lit only with window light. In the first, the baby's face was about a foot away from a very large, floor to ceiling window facing North. The second photo was taken in the middle of a large, vaulted living room with large windows floor to ceiling. She was facing the windows and I had my back to them facing her. The last one (of my daughter Mina) was right next to another large, North-facing window which is just out of the frame to the right.

September Photography Tip: Take More Photographs II (Do More Work)

I wrote the first part of this tip back in May and it's sort of been bugging me ever since. I just reread it and I think it's all true and can be of use and is a pretty good read if I do say so myself. The problem I've had with it is the underlying impression that "take more photographs" might have as a tip for improving your photography. We live in an instant gratification world and the last thing I want to imply is that all you have to do is hold down the shutter button a certain amount of time each day and viola! better photographs. So, it's been bugging me and out of the blue, about a month ago, a Seattle photographer named Chase Jarvis, whose blog I frequent, posted on the very same topic. He had a photographer write to him saying, "Your photographs are stunning. Mine are not. Not trying to oversimplify this, but how on earth do you do what do with a camera. I desperately want to move my creativity forward, but it won't seem to budge." Chase goes on to answer that there is what he calls a "creative gap" that separates what we want to do as artists and what we actually produce. This gap can be very frustrating; we see artistic work that we like and would love to be able to create ourselves, but we don't know how to do it. Chase goes on to say the following:

"But there is a clear answer to closing this gap and it's a simple one: Do MORE Work.

I discovered this in the early beginnings of my career, and I still remind myself of it to this day. Mastery is rarely innate. It requires a repetition of the fundamentals - creatively, technically, etc - you name it. It's through exploring that creative process over and over that we get stronger and better.

On the surface it might seem to some like we'd be pandering to luck, as in "take enough pictures and you're bound to get one good one", but that's crap. It really goes way beyond that. Get out there and make more pictures, and get your hands dirty, again and again, and you will close that gap over time. Interstingly, I find that it's also a way to discover your own style. You take enough pictures and you'll start to see a similarity in your vision. This understanding continues to help me tremendously as an artist."

Thats what I meant in the last post! Do more work! Take more photographs. Look at more photographs that you like. You will improve, and better yet, you will begin to find your own eye and your own vision.

Chase also added a link to this YouTube video made by Ira Glass, the guy who does "This American Life" on public radio. He's talking about exactly the same thing and it's really worth watching for a few minutes. Enjoy.

June Photography Tip

Watch the Shutter Speed!


Blurry photos are a common problem for point and shoot cameras. There are several reasons why so many photos come out blurry, and this month's tip addresses the most common... slow shutter speed.

Photographs are made up of light entering your camera and recording an image onto the digital sensor (and I’m told that photographs used to record onto some kind of film, but I can’t confirm or deny such rumors). The amount of light recorded on your sensor is controlled by the camera’s shutter, which opens to let the light in and then closes. Simple enough. That opening and closing has two variables to control HOW MUCH light gets in. One is the “aperture”, which describes how wide the shutter opens. The wider the shutter opens, the more light gets in. The second is “shutter speed”, which describes how long the shutter stays open. The longer it’s open, the more light gets in.

Most people put their camera on AUTO and let the camera decide how to set the aperture and shutter speed. Most of the time it does a fantastic job. Problems can arise, though, when there isn’t enough light and all of you know the result… blurry photographs. When the shutter is opened as wide as it can go, the only other way to let in more light is to leave the shutter open longer. This wouldn’t be a problem except for one thing… people move! Your subject moves and you move, too, and they are both a problem.

We could go into all kinds of technical stuff here, but the point is you either need more light or you need both you and your subject to hold still longer. When photographing indoors, move towards the window, or better yet, right next to it; it's a lot brighter there. Brace your camera on something solid like the back of a chair; that can help a lot. Many professionals use a tripod, but for everyday stuff, a chair works great. Having your subject sit still will help with blurriness, of course, but you'll obviously loose any spontaneity you many have had. Beyond that, you might just have to accept that your point and shoot camera wasn't made to shoot indoors very well with out deploying that unflattering flash. The final option is to buy a higher end camera which will give you more ways of dealing with low light. Their main drawback is that they don't fit in your pocket.

May Photography Tip

Take More Photographs

My clients are often shocked when they hear my camera's shutter clicking away during a session. "How many pictures are you taking?" they'll ask. "More than a hundred?" Uh,... a little more than that actually... closer to 4-600 in an hour! I've gotten used to the surprise and to ease their minds, I now begin most sessions by telling them, "So, you should know... I take A LOT of photographs." I don't want them to be alarmed or think that it has something to do with them, like they are especially difficult or something and that's why I'm blasting away. Nope. I take a lot of photographs. The main reason I'm taking so many isn't to improve the composition of an image or in the hopes that I might just get lucky. I take so many in order to capture fleeting expressions. I've found that I'm very often not fast enough to catch an expression that I like if I wait for it, especially the kind of expressions that are moving; I need to be shooting while it's happening in short bursts in the hopes of catching it (slower, more pensive expressions are easier to catch).

Now, I realize that photography purists, especially pre-digital types, will cringe at the idea of taking 10 frames per minute for a solid hour under any circumstances or for any reason, and I understand where they're coming from, I really do. No amount of machine-gun photography is going to result in a good image if the creative process isn't more involved than the index finger. But that doesn't mean taking a lot of photographs is inherently bad. Digital cameras and computers have opened up a whole new world of experimentation options that were never available to students of photography before. You can learn from your "mistakes" so quickly now, and from your successes. You get unprecedented amounts of feedback from your camera instantly and, better yet, when you get home on your monitor just a little while later. This kind of learning was unheard of just 10 years ago (5?). As you improve and learn, obviously the sheer number of photos should probably come down; you'll know better what it is you're after and more and more of the experimenting will take place in your head before you ever push the shutter release. So, get out there and put those fancy cameras you all have now to good use... take more photographs and then learn from them.


(Come see the fun slideshow of this entire session in another post ... all 600+ photos in one song! It's an interesting look at how I work)

April Photography Tip

Try the Shade.

One of the most common things you hear when people are taking photos of their family or friends is "turn towards the sun!" While this may produce very nice, bright, and colorful snapshots, it usually will not produce a very flattering portrait. The sun is the harshest, least forgiving light around and not easy at all to use. This is not to say that you should move your kids to the shade every time you want to take photos. If they are playing in the yard or on the beach, the sun will look very natural on them and will most likely make for a great photo. But, if you are trying to get a pleasing photograph of a group of people together at a party or picnic, facing them into the sun will usually create more problems than it will solve. Especially mid-day, the sun will create unpleasant dark circles under everyone's eyes. It will also make your subjects squint... not good. Next time, try putting your group into the shade of a building or tree and have them face out towards the open sky, which is a very nice, "soft" light. With the sky essentially lighting them instead of the sun, you will lose the harsh shadows and the squints all at once.


(sun is behind and to right of subject behind a large tree; he is facing open sky)


(preschool group in the same light and location)


(extreme example; sun is directly behind the subject putting her in the shade of her own body; trick is to keep direct sun off your lens or you'll get flare; I'm just barely in the shade of the railing to camera left)