The Digital Photography Book: The Step-by-Step Secrets for how to Make Your Photos Look Like the Pros 168198671X, 9781681986715

Citation preview

The Digital Photography Book The Digital Photography Book Team MANAGING EDITOR Kim Doty COPY EDITOR Cindy Snyder ART DIRECTOR Jessica Maldonado PHOTOGRAPHY Scott Kelby PUBLISHED BY Rocky Nook 1010 B Street, Suite 350 San Rafael, CA 94901 ©2020 Scott Kelby All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review. Composed in Myriad Pro, Univers LT, and Input Serif (Adobe Systems Incorporated) by Kelby Media Group Inc. Trademarks All terms mentioned in this book that are known to be trademarks or service marks have been appropriately capitalized. Rocky Nook cannot attest to the accuracy of this information. Use of a term in the book should not be regarded as affecting the validity of any trademark or service

mark. Photoshop, Elements, and Lightroom are registered trademarks of Adobe Systems, Inc. Nikon is a registered trademark of Nikon Corporation. Canon is a registered trademark of Canon Inc. Sony is a registered trademark of Sony Corporation. Warning and Disclaimer This book is designed to provide information about digital photography. Every effort has been made to make this book as complete and as accurate as possible, but no warranty of fitness is implied. The information is provided on an as-is basis. The author and Rocky Nook shall have neither the liability nor responsibility to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damages arising from the information contained in this book or from the use of the discs, websites, videos, or programs that may accompany it. ISBN 13: 978-1-68198-671-5 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed and bound in Korea Distributed in the UK and Europe by Publishers Group UK Distributed in the U.S. and all other territories by Ingram Publisher Services Library of Congress Control Number: 2020938961 www.rockynook.com www.kelbyone.com

This book is dedicated to my dear friend and colleague Victoria Pavlov for her support, friendship, and for taking such great care of my best friend. You are truly a gift to those around you.

Acknowledgments Although only one name appears on the spine of this book, it takes a team of dedicated and talented people to pull a project like this together. I’m not only delighted to be working with them, but I also get the honor and privilege of thanking them here. To my amazing wife Kalebra: This year we celebrated our 30th anniversary and you continue to reinforce what everybody always tells me—I’m the luckiest guy in the world. To my son Jordan: I just can’t believe my “little boy” has already graduated from college. It all happened so fast, but I’m so thrilled for you and for the many adventures, and for the fun, love, and laughter your future holds. If there’s a dad more proud of his son than I am, I’ve yet to meet him. #rolltide! To my beautiful daughter Kira: You are a little clone of your mom, and that’s the best compliment I could ever give you. I love your sense of humor, your constant dancing, the hilarious faces you make, and your heart. I love the young woman you are becoming, and I particularly love when you and I go grab lunch or dinner together. Those times are so precious to me. I love you, little sweetie! To my big brother Jeff: Your boundless generosity, kindness, positive attitude, and humility have been an inspiration to me my entire life, and I’m just so honored to be your brother. To my editor Kim Doty: If there’s a Book Editor Hall of Fame, you should truly be in it. You are so talented, organized, and awesome, and your amazing attitude, support, and ideas are what keep me going when I’m deep in the weeds, and I’ll be forever grateful to have you on my team. You rock! To my book designer Jessica Maldonado: I love the way you design, and all the clever little things you add to everything you do. Our book team struck gold when we found you! To my dear friend and business partner Jean A. Kendra: Thanks for putting up with me all these years, and for your support for all my crazy ideas. It really means a

lot. To Erik Kuna: Your suggestions, ideas, and good counsel have made this book, and the ones before it, that much better. I value your friendship so much, and feel very blessed to have you in my life. To Jeanne Jilleba: Thank you for juggling my very tricky schedule in ways that give me time to write these books. I’m very grateful to have your help, your talent, and your immeasurable patience every day. To Cindy Snyder: Thank you so much for working on my books and catching tons of little things others would have missed. To Ted Waitt, my fantastic “Editor for life” at Rocky Nook: Thanks for being such a great friend, a world-class sounding board, and for helping these ideas become a reality. To my publisher Scott Cowlin: I’m so delighted I still get to work with you, and grateful for your open mind and vision. To all the gifted photographers and instructors who’ve taught me so much over the years: Moose Peterson, Joe McNally, Bill Fortney, Anne Cahill, David Ziser, Jim DiVitale, Tim Wallace, Lindsay Adler, Peter Hurley, Cliff Mautner, Jeremy Cowart, Dave Black, Jay Maisel, Joel Grimes, Helene Glassman, and Monte Zucker. To my friends for just being my friends: Terry White, Dave Clayton, Jeff Revell, Peter Treadway, Ted Waitt, Paul Kober, Scott Stahley, Victoria Pavlov, Serge Ramelli, Kim Doty, Marvin Derezin, Dave Williams, Manny Steigman, Fernando Santos, Glyn Dewis, Robby Pisco, Mike McCaskey, Larry Grace, Matt Kloskowski, Ed Biuce, Tony Llanes, Larry Becker, Rob Foldy, Frank Doorhof, Jeff Leimbach, Deb Uscilka, Karen Hutton, John Swarce, Bryan Hughes, Kathy Porupski, Mike Kubiesy, Vanelli, Rick Sammon, Greg Rostami, Bob DeChiara, Mike Larson, Kleber Stephenson, Kelly Jones, Brad Moore, Mimo Meidany, Juan Alfonso, Cathy Baitson, Eric Eggly, Ramtin Kazemi, Skip Cohen, and John Couch. To my mentors, John Graden, Jack Lee, Dave Gales, Judy Farmer, and Douglas Poole: Your wisdom and whip-cracking have helped me immeasurably throughout my life, and I will always be in your debt, and grateful for your friendship and guidance.

Most importantly, I want to thank God, and His Son Jesus Christ, for leading me to the woman of my dreams, for blessing us with such amazing children, for allowing me to make a living doing something I truly love, for always being there when I need Him, for blessing me with a wonderful, fulfilling, and happy life, and such a warm, loving family to share it with.

Other Books by Scott Kelby The Natural Light Portrait Book Photoshop for Lightroom Users The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book for Digital Photographers The Flash Book The Landscape Photography Book How Do I Do That In Lightroom? How Do I Do That In Photoshop? Professional Portrait Retouching Techniques for Photographers The Digital Photography Book, parts 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5 Light It, Shoot It, Retouch It The Adobe Photoshop Book for Digital Photographers The Photoshop Elements Book for Digital Photographers It’s a Jesus Thing: The Book for Wanna Be-lievers Professional Sports Photography Workflow

About the Author

Scott Kelby Scott is President and CEO of KelbyOne, an online educational community for learning Lightroom, Photoshop, and photography. He is Editor, Publisher, and co-founder of Photoshop User magazine; Editor of Lightroom Magazine; host of The Grid, the influential, live, weekly talk show for photographers; and is founder of the annual Scott Kelby’s Worldwide Photo Walk.® Scott is a photographer, designer, and award-winning author of more than 100 books, including The Landscape Photography Book; The Adobe Photoshop Book for Digital Photographers; Photoshop for Lightroom Users; How Do I Do That In Lightroom?; The Flash Book; The Natural Light Portrait Book; and his landmark, The Digital Photography Book series. The first book in this series, The Digital Photography Book, part 1, has become the #1 top-selling book ever on digital photography. His books have been translated into dozens of different languages, including Chinese, Russian, Spanish, Korean, Polish, Taiwanese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Hebrew, Dutch, Swedish, Turkish, and Portuguese, among many others. He is a recipient of the prestigious ASP International Award, presented annually by the American Society of Photographers for

“. . . contributions in a special or significant way to the ideals of Professional Photography as an art and a science,” and the HIPA award, presented for his contributions to photography education worldwide. Scott is Conference Technical Chair for the annual Photoshop World Conference and a frequent speaker at conferences and trade shows around the world. He is featured in a series of online learning courses at KelbyOne.com and has been training Photoshop users and photographers since 1993. For more information on Scott, visit him at: His daily Lightroom blog: lightroomkillertips.com His personal blog: scottkelby.com Twitter: @scottkelby Facebook: facebook.com/skelby Instagram: @scottkelby

Contents Chapter One

Pro Tips for Getting Sharp Photos If Your Photos Aren’t Sharp, the Rest Doesn’t Matter

Seven Things You’ll Wish You Had Known . . . . . . Before Reading This Book! Two More of Those Things One Last Thing Getting “Tack Sharp” Starts with a Tripod A Ballhead Will Make Your Life Easier Don’t Press the Shutter Button Itself Forgot Your Cable Release? Use a Self Timer Stop Camera Shake by Shooting Wirelessly Don’t Raise Your ISO When You’re on a Tripod Secret Weapon for Sharper Hand-Held Shots Tuck in Your Elbows for Sharper Shots Turn Off Vibration Reduction (or IS) Zoom In to Check Sharpness How to Pick Your Own Focus Point If What You’re Shooting Moves, Do This . . . Sharpening After the Fact in Lightroom Sharpening After the Fact in Photoshop Why I Recommend Aperture Priority Mode What F-Stop Should You Use? Chapter Two

The Scoop on Lenses

Which Lens to Use, When, and Why

When to Use Super-Fast Lenses When to Use an “All-in-One” Zoom Lens When to Use a Super-Wide-Angle Lens When to Use a Fisheye Lens When to Use a Macro Lens Why Some Lenses Have Two F-Stops Use a Teleconverter to Get Even Closer You Need to Know About Lens Compression How to Focus Your Lens to Infinity Shoot at the F-Stop You Bought the Lens For The Deal on Lens Hoods You’re Probably Going to Lose Your Lens Hood Keep Your Rear Element Clean Avoid Dust and Other Junk Chapter Three

Shooting Landscapes Like a Pro How to Create Stunning Scenic Images

The Golden Rule of Landscape Photography This Is Definitely Tripod/Cable Release Time My Favorite Lens for Landscapes Which F-Stop to Use for Landscapes Keep from Destroying Part of Your Image How to Add Depth to Your Landscape Photos Where to Put the Horizon Line The Secret to Shooting Sunsets For Landscapes, You Need a Clear Subject Where to Focus for Landscape Shots

Getting the Star Filter Effect Look for Clouds to Hold the Color Composition: Using Negative Space Composition: Using Leading Lines A Timesaving Pano Trick The 7 Deadly Sins of Landscape Photography Why You Need a Polarizer Using a Graduated Neutral Density Filter Shooting Waterfalls Get the PhotoPills App Chapter Four

Shooting Travel Like a Pro How to Come Back with Images You’re Really Proud Of

In This Case, Less Gear Is More My Favorite Travel Lenses Shoot the Cliché Shots (and Show Them First!) Shoot the Details to Suggest the Whole Hiding Tourists, Cars, Buses, Etc. Another Trick for Hiding Tourists How to Avoid Blurry Travel Shots There’s a Picture in There Somewhere Working People into Your Travel Shots Getting People to Pose Hire a Model (It’s Cheaper Than You’d Think) Look for Vivid, Contrasting Colors Look for Simplicity Don’t Forget to Shoot the Food Create a Sense of Timelessness

Consider Location Scouting First Shooting without Tourists Take a Platypod Instead of a Tripod Chapter Five

Taking Portraits Like a Pro How to Make People Look Their Very Best in Pictures

My Go-To Lens for Portraits My Other Favorite Lens (85mm f/1.8) Avoid Wide-Angle Lenses Which F-Stop (Aperture Setting) to Use How and Where to Focus Capturing Genuine Expressions Where to Position Your Camera Positioning Your Subject in the Frame Don’t Leave Too Much Space Above Heads Popular Tip for Framing Portraits Blurring the Background Behind Your Subject Getting Great Light Outdoors Shooting in Direct Sunlight Using Reflectors and Which Color to Use When to Use a Black Reflector When to Use a Reflector and How to Aim It Using Window Light Using Seamless Backgrounds Using Painted Backdrops Taking Great Photos of Newborn Babies Chapter Six

Using Your Flash Like a Pro

If You’re Not in Love with Using Flash, That’s About to Change

Pop-Up Flash: Use It as a Weapon Why You Need an Off-Camera Flash Don’t Use TTL. Set Your Flash to Manual Mode Get Your Flash Off-Camera Don’t Use Your Pop-Up Flash as a Trigger Use a “Real” Wireless Controller How High to Set Your Flash Power What Flash “Groups” and “Channels” Are For Use the Right Shutter Speed or You’ll Get This I Start with This F-Stop Set Your ISO to Its Cleanest Setting Make Your Light Soft and Beautiful The Softbox I Use to Make the Light Soft Where to Place Your Flash for the Best Results Get Even Softer Light Super-Cheap Way to Make Beautiful Light You Might Have to “Bounce It” Why We Add Gel with Flash Outdoors When to Add a Second Flash (and Why) Brighten the Background Behind Your Subject Rear Sync Rocks (& Why You Should Use It) The Advantages of Using Flash in Daylight The Instant Black Background Shooting Sunset Portraits with Flash Chapter Seven

Shooting Weddings Like a Pro How to Get Professional Results from Your Next Shoot

Create a Shot List Shooting in Low-Light Situations (Like a Church) Another Big Helper When Low-Light Shooting Three Lenses I Take When Shooting Weddings Backlighting Your Bride Finding Beautiful Light for the Bride Formals: Where to Aim Formals: Don’t Cut Off Joints Formals: How High to Position Your Camera Change Your Vantage Point to Add Interest Shooting the Details: Which Ones to Shoot Try an “Unplugged” Wedding The Mini Macro Lens Perfect for Detail Shots Using Flash at the Reception Go Super-Wide for a More Epic Feel Why You Might Want a Second Shooter Dramatic Bridal Portrait #1 Dramatic Bridal Portrait #2 Chapter Eight

Shooting Sports Like a Pro How to Get Professional Results When You Shoot Your Next Game

Which Lenses to Use Adding a Teleconverter to Get Really Tight How the Pros Focus for Sports Change Your Focus Mode for Sports Which F-Stop to Use for Sports The Right Shutter Speed for Sports Auto ISO Makes Sure You Freeze the Action

Shooting at Night or Indoors? Raise Your ISO! Shooting in Burst Mode Using a Remote Camera Our Goal: Capture the Peak Moment of Action The Two Most Popular Sports Shots Pros Know the Sport & Shoot the Details Pan to Show Motion It’s All About the Crop! Two Eyes and a Ball Chapter Nine

Shooting Other Stuff Like a Pro How to Shoot All That Other Stuff We Wind Up Shooting

Don’t Shoot Down on Flowers Don’t Wait for Rain—Fake It! Flowers on a Black Background Use a Macro Lens to Get Really Close Which F-Stop Works Best for Macro Turn Autofocus Off for Shooting Macro Shooting Flowers with a Zoom Lens When to Shoot Bracketed How to Shoot a Bracketed Shot for HDR Including the Moon and Keeping Detail The Trick for Shooting a Cityscape at Night Making Your Own Product Photography Table The Advantage of Using Strip Banks Using Foam Core and Creating Reflections Shooting Cityscapes at Dusk Shooting Light Trails

Shooting Fireworks Photographing Animals in a Zoo Focus Stacking for Sharper Focus A Tip for Shooting on an Incline Better Than a Self-Timer for Group Shots If It’s Cold Outside, Bring Extra Batteries Chapter Ten

Pro Tips for Getting Better Photos Tricks of the Trade for Making Better Shots and Better Decisions

Is It Better to Underexpose or Overexpose? Want to Be Taken Seriously? Start Editing One Way to Get Better Faster WHIMS Will Keep You Out of Trouble Which Format to Shoot In (RAW, JPEG, or TIFF)? Handy Uses for Your LCD Monitor When to Switch to Spot Metering You Need to Copyright Your Photos Shoot Multiple Shots in Low-Light Situations What Looks Good in Black & White? Shoot Landscapes with Cloudy White Balance Rotate Tall or Rotate Image or Both? Avoid Signs Because They Draw Your Eye What People See First in Your Photos Keep from Accidentally Erasing Memory Cards Moving Your Point of Focus Chapter Eleven

How to Print Like a Pro At the End of the Day, It’s All About the Print

Make Your Life Easier: Print from Lightroom If Your Prints Come Out Too Dark What Print Resolution to Use Sending Prints to a Photo Lab How Many Megapixels Do You Need? Do Not Buy an 8x10 Printer Printing Lab-Quality 13x19s Printing 17x22s—The Pros’ Paper Size Choice Which Paper Should You Print On? What Determines Which Style of Paper? Getting Your Monitor to Match Your Printer Download the Color Profiles for Your Paper Sharpening Your Images for Print Printing on Canvas Skip the “Edge-to-Edge” Printing Thing Making Custom Layouts in Lightroom Chapter Twelve

Photo Recipes to Help You Get the Shot The Simple Ingredients That Make It All Come Together

SHUTTER SPEED: 1/125 sec | F-STOP: F/6.7 | ISO: 100 | FOCAL LENGTH: 75mm

Chapter One

Pro Tips for Getting Sharp Photos If Your Photos Aren’t Sharp, the Rest Doesn’t Matter Taking super-sharp photos is really important to us as photographers, but just knowing that some photographers live and die by the sharpness of their images can be a huge advantage to you. For example, the next time you’re at one of those glitzy photography parties where the place is packed with celebrities, the champagne is flowing, and DJ Tiësto is “spinnin’ labels on the turntables,” try this: casually walk over to one of the photographers standing around bragging about their latest gallery showing and say, “Hey, I caught your show at the gallery, and I must say, I really admire the fact that you didn’t let it bother you that so many of the images were soft.” During that short sentence, you’ll see that photographer’s smile slowly turn to a look of horror, then of disgust, and then finally, shame (oh, the shame!). You can almost count the minutes before you see them sneak away on their cell phone, posting their gear for sale at bargain prices. That is how crushing it is to hear that one of your images isn’t in sharp focus (even if you weren’t at their gallery show, and their images actually were sharp, this is just another fun aspect of being a photographer, which is crushing the hopes and dreams of other photographers). It’s like that saying: The only thing two photographers can agree on is that the third photographer isn’t any good. But I digress. I think you can see from this realworld example (taped live before a studio audience) that having your images crisp and sharp is a vitally important thing to you, to me, to everyone. That’s why we freak out when we learn that getting sharp shots isn’t about buying a new lens, but of course, we only learn that after we just bought a really expensive new lens some guy on the Internet said was “super-sharp.” The fact is that there’s a lot more to getting sharp shots than buying a new lens. In fact, you can get really sharp shots with the lens you have, but if you stop buying lenses, the lens industry will come to a grinding halt, which is kind of a pun, but the long and short of it is this: don’t expect subsequent chapter intros to

have as much to do with the chapter topic as this one did, which isn’t really all that much. It’s an anomaly. The rest, well, they’re pretty whacked, so semienjoy this one while it’s here.

Seven Things You’ll Wish You Had Known . . .

(1) Here’s how this book works: Basically, it’s you and me together at a shoot, and I’m giving you the same tips, the same advice, and sharing the same techniques I’ve learned over the years from some of the top working pros. When I’m with a friend, I skip all the technical stuff, so for example, if you turned to me and said, “Hey Scott, I want the light to look really soft and flattering. How far back should I put this softbox?” I wouldn’t give you a lecture about lighting ratios or flash modifiers. In real life, I’d just turn to you and say, “Move it in as close as you can to your subject without it actually showing up in the shot. The closer you get, the softer and more wrapping the light gets.” I’d tell you short and right to the point. Like that. So that’s what I do here. (2) There are extra tips at the bottom of a lot of pages and sometimes they relate

to the technique on that particular page, and sometimes I just had a tip and needed to fit it somewhere, so I put it on that page. So, you should probably at least take a quick glance anytime you see a tip box on the bottom of a page— ya know, just in case.

. . . Before Reading This Book!

(3) Sometimes you have to buy stuff. This is not a book to sell you stuff, but before you move forward, understand that to get pro results, sometimes you have to use some accessories that the pros use. I don’t get a kickback or promo fee from any companies whose products I recommend (rats!). I’m just giving you the exact same advice I’d give a friend. (4) I wound up making you some video tutorials. Some of the post-processing stuff for some of the shots is kind of hard to explain with just text, so I made some videos for you that show exactly what was done. Luckily, none of it is hard—you’ll be able to do every single thing I teach you because the videos are all simple, clear, and step by step. I use Lightroom a lot (it’s my main tool), but sometimes I have to use Photoshop (if you’re a Photoshop Elements user,

you won’t be left behind—nearly everything I show in a video can also be done there, too). Also, if you use Photoshop’s Camera Raw plug-in (instead of Lightroom), that’s okay because Lightroom has Camera Raw built right in (it has the same sliders, in the same order, that do the same exact things). I put up a webpage with all the videos and links to any gear I mentioned, and this was all created expressly for this book, and exclusively for you, my awesome, awesome reader and new best friend in the whole wide world. Here’s the link: http://kelbyone.com/books/dpbook2020 (but turn the page because you’ve still got few more important things to go!).

Two More of Those Things

(5) If you’re shooting with a Sony, or Olympus, or Fuji digital camera, don’t let it throw you that a Canon or Nikon camera is pictured. Since most people are shooting with a Canon or Nikon, you’ll see both (although I shoot primarily Canon cameras and lenses these days), but either way—don’t sweat it—most of the techniques in this book apply to any DSLR or mirrorless camera, and even many of the point-and-shoot digital cameras, as well. (6) WARNING: The intro page at the beginning of each chapter is just designed to give you a quick mental break, and honestly, they have little to do with the chapter. In fact, they have little to do with anything, but writing these quirky, off-the-wall chapter intros is kind of a tradition of mine (I do this in all my books), but if you’re one of those really “serious” types—I’m begging you—skip them because they’ll just get on your nerves. By the way, if you somehow are

into these quirky chapter intros, I made an entire eBook of nothing but my favorites compiled from all my books, and it’s called Buy This Book of Chapter Intros Even Though You Won’t Learn Anything. One hundred percent of the profits from the sale of the eBook goes to support the Springs of Hope Orphanage in Kenya, which is an orphanage that was built from the ground up with the gracious support of people who read my daily blog and take part in my annual Worldwide Photo Walk. You can find it on Amazon for the Kindle or on Apple Books. You’ll really dig it (or hate it with the passion of a thousand burning suns), but either way, you’re helping some orphans so you still get lots of good karma and, in the end, everybody makes out (stop snickering! You know what I meant).

One Last Thing

(7) Keep this in mind: This is a “show me how to do it” book. I’m telling you these tips just like I’d tell a shooting buddy, and that means, oftentimes, it’s just which button to push, which setting to change, where to put the light, without all the technical explanations. I figure that once you start getting amazing results from your camera, you’ll go out and buy one of those “tell me all about it” camera or lighting books that goes into all that technical stuff and you’ll learn terms like “chromatic aberration” and “lens diffraction” and “hyper focal distance.” I truly hope this book ignites your passion for photography by helping you get the kind of results you always hoped you’d get from your photography. Now pack up all your gear, it’s time to head out for our first shoot.

Getting “Tack Sharp” Starts with a Tripod

There’s not just one trick that will give you the sharp photos the pros get; it’s a combination of things that all come together to give you “tack sharp” shots. (Tack sharp is the term pro photographers use to describe the ultimate level of sharpness. Sadly, we aren’t the best at coming up with highly imaginative names for things.) So, while there are a number of things you’ll need to do to get tack-sharp photos, the most important is shooting on a tripod. In fact, if there’s one single thing that really separates the pros from the amateurs, it’s that the pros shoot on a tripod very often (even in daylight). Yes, it’s more work, but it’s the key ingredient that amateurs miss. Pros will do the little things that most amateurs aren’t willing to do; that’s part of the reason their photos look like they do. Keeping the camera still and steady is a tripod’s only job, but when it comes to tripods, some do a lot better job than others. That’s why you don’t want to skimp on quality. You’ll hear pros talking about this

again and again, because cheap tripods simply don’t do a great job of keeping your camera that steady. That’s why they’re cheap. If at any time, when you’re carrying around your tripod, you say to yourself, “Man, this big tripod is a pain in the butt,” then you know you bought the right one.

A Ballhead Will Make Your Life Easier

Here’s the thing: when you buy a pro-quality tripod, you generally get just the tripod (the legs part). It often doesn’t come with a tripod head affixed like the cheap-o tripods do, so you’ll have to buy one separately (by the way, this ballhead thing isn’t necessarily about getting sharp images, but it is about keeping your sanity). Ballheads are wonderful because with just one knob they let you quickly and easily aim and position your camera accurately at any angle (which you’ll find is a huge advantage). Best of all, good ballheads keep your camera locked down tight to keep it from “creeping” (slowly sliding one way or the other) after you’ve set up your shot. Like tripods, a good ballhead isn’t cheap, but if you buy a good one, you’ll fall in love with it and keep it for many years. The one shown here is my favorite budget-priced ballhead. The Oben BE-117 is small and lightweight, but surprisingly sturdy, and it’s only around $85, which is a steal compared to my all-time favorite ballhead, which is the

Really Right Stuff BH-40 Ballhead. It costs around $415, but I’ve probably had it for 15+ years and it works just as great as it did the day I bought it. It is the “Ballhead of the Gods,” mostly because only mythical Greek gods can afford it.

BREAKING THE RULES

So what do you do if you can’t use a tripod (e.g., the place where you’re shooting won’t allow tripods)? In this case, if there’s plenty of light where you’re shooting, you won’t have to worry about it—just shoot in aperture priority mode and your shutter speed will be so fast (probably at least 1/1000 of a second) that you’ll still get a sharp shot because your shutter will be only open for . . . well . . . 1/1000 of a second.

Don’t Press the Shutter Button Itself

Okay, so now you’re lugging around a tripod, and your photos are looking much sharper. Not tack sharp yet, but much sharper. What will take you to the next level of sharpness? Not touching your camera. Believe it or not, when you press the shutter button, it moves your camera. It shakes it just enough to keep your photos from being tack sharp. I know, it sounds like a little thing, but it’s bigger than it sounds. Because of this camera shake issue, you need a way to take a shot without actually touching your camera, and luckily there are lots of ways to do this. You can buy a wireless remote fairly inexpensively for most cameras or you can go “old school” and buy a cable release. It’s a shutter button that connects to your camera with (wait for it . . . wait for it . . . ) a

cable. They start at around $8 (like the Vello Remote Switch you see above, which is what I have), so they’re also inexpensive and time-tested (no fancy wireless connectivity needed). It doesn’t matter which method you use, as long as you use one of them to remove that camera shake you get by physically pressing the shutter button.

Forgot Your Cable Release? Use a Self Timer

If you don’t want to spring for a cable release (or wireless remote), or if you’re out shooting and forgot yours (which has happened to me on numerous occasions), then the next best thing is to use your digital camera’s built-in self timer. I know, you normally think of using this so you can run and get in the shot really quickly, but think about it—what does the self timer do? It takes the shot without you touching the camera, right? Right! So, it pretty much does the same job of keeping your camera from moving—you just have to wait about 10 seconds (that’s usually the default). If you hate waiting (I sure do), then see if your camera allows you to change the amount of time it waits before it shoots. I’ve lowered mine to just two seconds (see the menu above). I press the shutter button and then two seconds later, the shot fires (I figure that two seconds is enough time for any movement caused by my pressing the shutter release to subside).

Stop Camera Shake by Shooting Wirelessly

Another option, if you’re shooting on a tripod and want to avoid any camera shake, is to download your camera company’s free phone app and take your shots wirelessly right from the app. Nikon, Canon, Fuji, Sony, Olympus—they all have free apps that can press the shutter release wirelessly for you, so there’s no camera shake whatsoever. Since most cameras these days come with a built-in wireless feature, setting it up is a breeze. Also, using an app to wirelessly fire your camera comes in handy when you have your camera down low (maybe on the ground), or in a hard-to-get-to place (like behind the bride at the altar during the ceremony), and most allow you to see a preview of what the camera is seeing and give you the ability to change your camera settings right there in the app.

Don’t Raise Your ISO When You’re on a Tripod

When you’re shooting on a tripod, even in very dim or low light, don’t increase your ISO (your digital equivalent of film speed). Keep your ISO at the lowest setting your camera allows for the sharpest, cleanest photos (for most cameras today that is ISO 100, but depending on your make and model, it could be as low as 50 or 64). Raising the ISO adds noise to your photos, which affects sharpness, and you don’t want that (of course, if you’re hand-holding and have no choice, like when shooting a wedding in the low lighting of a church, then increasing the ISO is a necessity to get your shutter speed high enough so you don’t get blurry images—more on that on the next page. But, when shooting on a tripod, avoid high ISOs like the plague—you’ll have cleaner, sharper images every time). One more thing: you want to use your camera’s lowest native ISO and that would be a number, not a letter. So, if below ISO 100 you have something like L1 or L2, still stick with ISO 100, its cleanest native ISO.

Secret Weapon for Sharper Hand-Held Shots

If you’re shooting hand-held outdoors in the middle of a sunny day, chances are your shots are going to be pretty sharp. Since there’s so much light, your camera’s shutter will only be open for a fraction of a second (literally like 1/4000 of a second), getting all the light it needs to make the photo quickly. At super-fast shutter speeds like that, even if you weren’t perfectly still, you’d get a sharp photo. However, in low-light situations (like in a church, or a restaurant, or at sunrise or sunset), way more light is needed, so the shutter has to stay open longer—maybe a full second or more (depending on the light). And, if there’s any movement, you’ll get a blurry shot. That’s why we love to shoot on tripods—there’s no camera movement whatsoever, even if your shutter is open for two minutes. Of course, there are situations where shooting on one would be impractical or not allowed. So, how high a shutter speed would we need to get sharp shots hand-holding? I’d say around 1/125 of a second. If

your shutter speed falls below that, chances are you’re going to have a blurry shot. How do we make sure our shutter speed doesn’t fall below 1/125? We turn on our secret weapon: Auto ISO. But, we don’t just turn it on, we set Auto ISO’s minimum shutter speed to 1/125, so no matter how low the light, our camera will make certain we have a shutter speed of no less than 1/125. It does this by raising your ISO high enough to where you get a shutter speed of at least 1/125. But, doesn’t raising your ISO add some noise to your photos? Yes, it does. But, if you have a choice between a sharp shot that has some noise or a blurry shot, you’ll take the sharp shot every time. It’s a trade-off, but a decent one. Also, for this to work, you need to be shooting in aperture priority mode, which I recommend nearly all the time anyway (see page 20).

Tuck in Your Elbows for Sharper Shots

Another technique for getting sharper photos when hand-holding your camera is to steady the camera by holding it with your elbows tucked in toward your body. This helps anchor the camera to your body, keeping it steadier, and giving you sharper photos. This is an easier change to make than you’d think, and once you see the results, you’ll be glad you did it.

SHOOT AT YOUR LENS’S SHARPEST APERTURE

Another trick the pros use is, when possible, shoot at your lens’s sharpest aperture. For most lenses, that is about two full stops smaller than wide open (so the f-stop number you use will go higher by two stops). Now, this isn’t true for all lenses, and if that’s not the case with your lens, you’ll find

your lens’s sharpest aperture by keeping an eye out for which aperture your sharpest images seem to come from.

Turn Off Vibration Reduction (or IS)

One thing lens manufacturers have done to help us when we are in situations where we have to hand-hold our cameras in low light (where our shutter speed would drop so much that it’s likely our photos would come out blurry from us moving the camera while the shutter is open) is that many lenses today have built-in stabilizers. Think of them as mini-gyroscopes that literally steady any movement for us, and they actually work wonders. They have slightly different names depending on which brand you use. Nikon calls theirs VR (for Vibration Reduction) and Sony and Canon call theirs IS (for Image Stabilization), but they all do essentially the same thing: they stabilize the lens from any movement, so you get sharper shots. This only works for hand-holding, not when you’re on a tripod, but if you wind up hand-holding in low-light situations fairly often (for example, you’re a wedding photographer, shooting in dimly lit churches), look for lenses that have some type of a built-in stabilization and

you’ll come away with sharper and way less blurry shots. One more thing: if your lens has VR or IS, and you are shooting on a tripod, turn the VR or IS feature off. These lenses look for vibration. If they don’t find any, they’ll go looking for it, and that looking for vibration when there is absolutely none can cause (you guessed it) some small vibration.

Zoom In to Check Sharpness

Have you noticed that pretty much everything looks sharp and in focus on the tiny LCD screen on the back of your camera? When your photo is displayed at that small size, it just about always looks sharp. However, you’ll soon learn (once you open your photo on your computer) that you absolutely can’t trust that tiny screen. You’ve got to zoom in and check the sharpness while you’re out there still shooting. There’s a zoom button on the back of your camera (its icon looks like a magnifying glass) that lets you zoom in to see if the photo is really in focus. Do this right on the spot, right after you take the shot, so you still have a chance to retake the photo if you zoom in and find out it’s blurry. The pros check for sharpness this way because they’ve been burned one too many times. Many of today’s cameras even let you assign a particular amount of zoom (like 4x or 8x) that you can quickly zoom into using just one button on the back of your camera (rather than pressing the button a bunch of times to

zoom in one level at a time, and then having to zoom back out one level at a time). Check your camera’s manual to see if you can assign a one-button zoom, and then it’s just one click to zoom in and one click to zoom right back out.

How to Pick Your Own Focus Point

Today’s auto focus systems are pretty darn good at picking what to focus on in your scene, but they’re not perfect, and they can’t read your mind. That’s why, sometimes, instead of letting the camera choose what it thinks you want in focus, you might just want to tell the camera what to focus on yourself. You do this by moving the focus point that appears when you look in your viewfinder (or on your LCD screen if you’re shooting in Live View mode) right over the thing you want in focus. For example, let’s say you’re shooting a street scene in a city, and your camera wants to focus on the wall in the center of the scene, but you want it to focus on a person standing off to the side. You would use the joystick (or dial, or whatever your brand of camera uses) to move the focus point over onto that person, and then take your shot, knowing that what you want in focus is in focus. You can also do this by aiming the center point (the one you see onscreen, probably in red) right over that person, and then holding

the shutter button halfway down. This locks the focus on that shot and now you can recompose the image any way you’d like knowing that area will be in focus. Either way will do the trick.

WHAT TO DO IF YOUR IMAGE ISN’T QUITE GOOD ENOUGH TO PRINT

If you’ve taken a shot that you really, really love, but is not as sharp as you’d like it to be, or you don’t have enough resolution to print it at the size you’d like, print it to canvas. With its thick texture and intentionally soft look, it covers a multitude of sins, and images that would look pretty bad as a print on paper, look absolutely wonderful on canvas.

If What You’re Shooting Moves, Do This . . .

By default, your camera assumes that what you’re shooting is just sitting there, not moving, like a still life shot of some apples in a bowl. So, its focus mode is set for that—things that don’t move. That’s why you get so many photos that are out of focus when you shoot something that moves, like a bird, or wildlife, or any sport, or a toddler. When what you’re shooting moves, to get a lot more of the shot in focus, you want to change your camera’s focus mode to one designed for moving objects—one that uses predictive tracking, which locks onto your image as you follow along, aiming at the subject, and keeps that focus as the object is moving. The predictive part is based on the direction and speed the subject is currently moving, so your focus system can pretty much figure out how to keep its focus locked on that moving subject. It’s not 100% accurate, and it can jump off the subject if something gets in the way (like a referee at a football game, or another player who runs in front of your subject),

but overall, it’s dramatically better than the default. On Canon cameras, this mode for tracking moving images is called “AI Servo.” On Sony cameras, it’s called “AF-C” (Continuous Autofocus), and on Nikon cameras, it’s called “AFC” or “Continuous Focus” mode. Turn this feature on and it will make a huge difference in the number of sharp, in-focus images you get when your subject is moving. Also, remember to pan along with your subject, tracking them with the camera as they move (across the sky, or the field, or the rink).

Sharpening After the Fact in Lightroom

If you’ve followed all the tips in this chapter, and have some nice crisp photos, you can make them look even sharper by adding sharpening in either Adobe Lightroom (incredibly popular editing software for photographers), Adobe Photoshop (loved by pros; higher learning curve), or Adobe Photoshop Elements (for semi-pros; easier learning curve). Now, which photos actually need to be sharpened? All of them. We sharpen every photo we shoot, period! Lightroom has some built-in presets in the Develop module that work well— click on them and it applies the sharpening for you. But, you can also sharpen manually in the Detail panel (also in the Develop module. The Detail panel is

also in the cloud version of Lightroom). If you shot in RAW, you’ll notice that Lightroom has already set the Amount slider to 40 for you (if you have the current version of Lightroom. If you’re using an older version, it’s set to 25), but it’s generally not enough sharpening (Adobe made a very conservative choice on the amount here), so I crank it up a bit. For everyday use, I up the Amount to 50, but if the subject of your image has lots of detail (like a landscape, or a motorcycle, or a car, or a cityscape), you can go as high as 60, or maybe even 70 depending on the image (zoom in to a 100%, 1:1 view to see how your sharpening looks). If you shot in JPEG, your image was already sharpened in your camera, so Lightroom’s Sharpening Amount slider will be set to zero. But, I still bump it up to around 15 or 20 for JPEG images, just to get them sharpened like I want. If you work in Photoshop, you’ll find my Unsharp Mask settings on the next page.

Sharpening After the Fact in Photoshop

In Photoshop (or Photoshop Elements), you’d use the Unsharp Mask filter (something named “unsharp” sounds like it would make your photos blurry, but it doesn’t—the name is a holdover from traditional darkroom techniques). Go under the Filter menu, under Sharpen, and choose Unsharp Mask. In its dialog, there are three sliders for applying different sharpening parameters, but rather than going through all that technical stuff, here are five sets of settings that I’ve found work wonders: (1) For people: Amount 150%; Radius 1; Threshold 10.

(2) For cityscapes or travel: Amount 65%; Radius 4; Threshold 3. (3) For general everyday use: Amount 120%; Radius 1.1; Threshold 3. (4) For super-sharpening (sports photos, landscapes, stuff with lots of details): Amount 95%; Radius 1.5; Threshold 1. (5) For images I’ve already made smaller and lower-resolution for the web: Amount 85%; Radius 1; Threshold 4.

Why I Recommend Aperture Priority Mode

Technically, we’ve wrapped up the getting-sharp-shots stuff, but there are still a couple of things I want you to know, right up front, so I hope it’s okay if I drop these two pages in right here at the end of this chapter (by the way, I won’t know if you’re okay with it or not since this is a book, so I’m going to have to assume you’re cool with it, but you seem like a pretty chill person, so thanks in advance). Unless I’m shooting with flash (where you need to be shooting in manual mode for reasons I discuss in Chapter 6), I always shoot in aperture priority mode (it’s usually the A or Av on your camera’s mode dial). What I love about aperture priority mode is that I choose the f-stop I want, and then my camera will automatically pick the proper shutter speed for me to get a properly exposed image. So, shutter speed is one thing I don’t generally have to worry about unless I’m shooting in really low light (see page 12). If I’m not messing around with camera settings, that means I’m focusing on stuff that really matters, like composition and quality of light, so shooting in aperture priority mode frees me to do just that—focus on the important stuff. And, that’s why I always recommend to friends that they shoot in aperture priority mode—let the camera do some of the nerdy stuff for you, and now you’re free to be more creative.

What F-Stop Should You Use?

Now, if you’re wondering what f-stop to use for what you’re about to shoot, here’s something to think about that might help you: For the most part, we generally only use two ranges of f-stops. We use high-numbered f-stops, like f/11 or f/16, when we want everything in focus throughout the photo, from front to back (as seen above on the right). We use low-numbered f-stops, like f/2.8 or f/4, when we want our subject in focus (like maybe a person, or a statue, or some other object) and the background behind them soft and out of focus (as seen above on the left). Well, what are all those other f-stops, like f/8, for? Not much. I’ve heard those in-between f-stops referred to as the “I don’t care” f-stops. Now, as you progress in your photography, there will be certain times when you will need to use some of those other f-stops, but I think it’s helpful to know, up front, a good starting place for picking your f-stop. So, keep in mind what I just discussed: higher numbers mean a lot will be in

focus; lower numbers help get the background out of focus. Note: You’ll find more specific f-stops in each chapter; for example, check out page 43 in the landscape chapter or page 85 in the portrait chapter.

SHUTTER SPEED: 1/800 sec | F-STOP: F/8 | ISO: 400 | FOCAL LENGTH: 560mm

Chapter Two

The Scoop on Lenses Which Lens to Use, When, and Why Have you noticed how rarely people actually switch camera brands these days? I mean, it does happen, but it’s pretty rare. So, why do they stay with one brand so long? When it’s time to get a new car, we shop around, see what’s out there, and according to recent statistics from the Car Retention Academic Program (or CRAP, for short), it’s very likely we’ll change brands. However, when it comes to photography, when it’s time for a new camera body, we stick with what we’ve got. CRAP says it’s not out of blind loyalty to a particular brand, or because we have formed an emotional bond with the brand. It’s because lenses cost so much these days. According to data from the Lens Association for Microstructure Education (or LAME, for short), the reason we stick with these brands is simply that we haven’t just bought a camera, we’ve bought into a system, and a big part of that system is the lenses. So when it’s time to buy a new camera body, LAME notes we can’t just pick any brand because we don’t have any lenses that fit that body, and selling our current lenses is too big a pain, so we just stick with what we’ve got. However, it doesn’t have to be that way. According to a report from the Metropolitan Online Industry Statistics Tribunal (or MOIST, for short), many photographers these days don’t realize how easy it is to actually shoplift lenses, and that the laws in many states are so lax that even if you get caught, chances are the fines will be far less than you’d lose by selling all your current lenses on eBay. Another option, of course, and one preferred by The Organization for Worldwide Education of Light, Exposure, Tungsten, and Telephoto Equipment (or TOWELETTE, for short) is to wait for a dawn shoot at a popular sunrise location (maybe somewhere in Arizona or Utah), and look for a photographer there who shoots the same brand of lenses you want to shoot. Toss a flash bang in their direction while they’re messing with their camera settings, then grab their camera bag and run like hell. Now, just so you know, I am in no way advocating theft. This stuff is straight from the folks at MOIST TOWELETTE, so if you get caught, you can call them to post your bail.

When to Use Super-Fast Lenses

If you want to shoot indoors without using flash (like in a church, museum, theater, or anywhere flash and/or tripods aren’t allowed), then you need a really fast lens (which just means a lens whose f-stop goes to a very low number, like f/2.8, f/1.8, or f/1.4. The lower the number, the lower light you’ll be able to shoot in without using a tripod). Here’s why this is so crucial: when you shoot in a dark place, the only way your camera can make a photograph is to slow down your shutter speed, so more light makes its way into your camera. That’s not a problem if your camera is mounted on a tripod, because it’s perfectly still. However, if you’re hand-holding your camera (which is going to be the case in almost every church, museum, etc.), and your shutter speed falls below 1/60 of a second, you’re going to have photos that look okay on the back of your camera, but when you open them later on your computer, they will likely be so blurry that they’re basically unusable. So, by setting your camera to one

of these “wide open” f-stops, like f/2.8, f/1.8, or f/1.4, you’ll be able to handhold in lots of places and still have sharp, clear images where normally they’d be blurry as heck. In this case, less (a lower number) is more.

IF YOU’RE REALLY SERIOUS ABOUT GETTING SHARPER IMAGES, TRY THIS TRICK!

You can use the same technique sharpshooters (with rifles) use to minimize any movement while firing—they hold their breath. That’s right. When hand-holding, some pro photographers only shoot after they exhale (or they take a deep breath and hold it, then shoot). This minimizes body movement, which minimizes camera shake.

When to Use an “All-in-One” Zoom Lens

Wouldn’t it be awesome to go out shooting and be able to take just one lens? One that does it all, from wide angle to long zoom, so you can stop lugging a camera bag full of gear around? Well, you’re in luck because there are some great lenses out there that do just that. For full-frame cameras, we’re talking the 24–240mm for Canons and Sonys and the 28–300mm for Nikons (for crop-sensor bodies, everybody makes an 18–200mm). Best of all, they’re compact, lightweight, and relatively inexpensive. These are ideal for travel photography or photo walks, for city shooting, and even landscapes if you’ll be shooting on a tripod. With one of these, you’re never going to say, “I missed that shot because I had my wide-angle lens on when I needed my telephoto” (or vice versa) because that one lens has both wide and long, and everything in-between. Just a heads-up: you may read some photographers in online forums claiming these all-in-one lenses are somehow beneath them because

they’re not as sharp as the more expensive high-end zoom lenses they’re used to lugging around. Don’t let that throw you. I don’t know a single photographer that has one of these that doesn’t love its light weight, low price, and flexibility.

When to Use a Super-Wide-Angle Lens

I grab a super-wide lens (something like a 16mm or 14mm on a full-frame body, or a 10mm or 12mm on a crop-sensor body) when I want to make the scene I’m standing in front of look bigger and more epic. This works incredibly well in small places, like indoors in a small chapel (you can make it look like a huge cathedral) or outdoors when there’s something right in the foreground that you want to emphasize (like a piece of driftwood, or a large rock, or a small pond). Super-wide lenses push the scene in front of you farther away, and especially, if you get down low and shoot from a low perspective, they can really create an epic look to the scene. The only time I don’t take a super-wide with me is when I’m photographing people (super wides, and even just wide angles, like a 24mm or 35mm, tend to distort facial features just enough to make your subject look awkward enough to never hire you again).

USING ACTIVE VR FOR NIKON USERS

If you’re a Nikon shooter, your VR lens may have a setting called Active. That only needs to be turned on when what you’re standing on is moving (if you’re shooting from a boat, or a moving car, or a suspension bridge, etc.).

When to Use a Fisheye Lens

These are well-named, because they give you an incredibly wide, almost circular view (and the lens itself bulges out like a fish’s eye, but honestly I don’t know if the lens was named for how the lens looks, or for how the photo it takes looks). This is definitely a special-effects lens, so you don’t want to overuse it. When you show somebody a fisheye photo, you’ll usually get a great reaction—it’s a show-stopper because it creates such a unique look, and people dig seeing something different and unusual like that. When you show them a second fisheye photo, they’ll still probably dig it. By the third fisheye photo, the novelty starts to wear off and pretty soon they start to get annoyed (the whole “too much of a good thing” thing). I figure showing two fisheye shots from a shoot is about right. Show more than two . . . well, it’s risky, and could induce vertigo. I dunno, it’s possible, but anyway, you get the idea. Less is more. However, in the right circumstances, fisheye shots look really

fascinating (try holding it up high over your head in a crowd, or at dinner in a restaurant, shooting straight down). One thing about fisheye lenses is that they do distort the horizon line quite a bit. For the minimum amount of distortion, try to keep the lens level in front of you, but if you want more creative looks, then all bets are off—just have fun with it. I grab this lens when I’m going to be in a crowd, when I’m shooting up high in a sports stadium and want to take the whole thing in, or when I’m shooting up at skyscrapers in a city. You’ll find lots of uses, but remember the “just show two” rule.

When to Use a Macro Lens

Pull out this lens when you want to shoot something really close up. Ever see close-up photos of bees, or flowers, or ladybugs? That’s macro. Dedicated macro lenses do just that one thing, but they do it really well. A couple things about macro lenses: (1) They have an amazingly shallow depth of field—you can be shooting a flower, and the petal in the front will be sharp and in focus, and a petal on the other side of the flower will be so out of focus you can barely make out what it is (see Chapter 9 for more on shooting flowers). That shallow depth of field is one of the things that I love about macro lenses, but it’s also a challenge when you’re trying to get more things in focus. Try keeping your lens horizontal, and not angling it up or down, to get a little more depth. Lower your tripod to the point where you are aiming directly at the subject without tilting the lens. (2) Any little movement or vibration will mean an outof-focus photo, so definitely shoot on a tripod if at all possible. Using some

kind of remote shutter release, so you don’t actually have to touch the camera (possible vibration maker), will also help (see Chapter 1).

FOCUS ON THE EYES

In portrait photography, we always focus on the eyes to get the sharpest image. Same thing in wildlife photos. Same thing in macro shots of insects or butterflies, or any little critters that wind up in your viewfinder.

Why Some Lenses Have Two F-Stops

When you see a zoom lens that has two different f-stops, what that means is that at the shorter range (let’s say it’s an 18–200mm lens, so we’d be talking about when you’re at 18mm), the f-stop can go as low as f/3.5, but when you zoom it out to 200mm, the f-stop will automatically increase to f/5.6. What this tells you is two things: (1) If you shoot at the wide-angle end (18mm), you’ll be able to shoot in much lower light than you can zoomed in at 200mm (the lower the f-stop of the lens, the darker light you can hand-hold your camera in and still get sharp photos). This also means (2) that this is a lessexpensive lens. “Really good glass” (as it’s called) has a constant aperture (the same f-stop all the way through the zoom range), so the lens would be at, say, f/2.8, whether you’re out at a wide angle or zoomed in tight (for example, Nikon’s 70–200 f/2.8 VR lens can shoot at f/2.8 whether you’re zoomed out at 70mm or zoomed in tight at 200mm).

WHY YOU MIGHT WANT TO SHOOT MACRO INDOORS

A lot of nature macro photography is actually done indoors, rather than outside (in most cases, you’re going to be so close in, you don’t have to worry much about anyone realizing that you’re in a studio). One of the main advantages of shooting macro indoors is that there’s no wind—the tiniest bit of wind will make your photos soft and out of focus. Another advantage is that you can control the light, and the key to lighting macro shots is to have nice even lighting across the entire image.

Use a Teleconverter to Get Even Closer

Want to get much closer to the action (or the animals) without breaking the bank with a huge, heavy, very expensive lens? Then get a teleconverter (also called a tele-extender). These small, lightweight accessories extend the focal range of your current lens, so you can get in closer. My favorite is a 1.4x teleextender. It takes my 70–200mm lens, which normally gets me only as close as 200mm, up to a whopping 280mm when I zoom all the way in, without any noticeable loss of quality (especially when you use it on long lenses), and at a fraction of the cost (around $430) of buying a fast 300mm lens ($1,350). The only potential downside is that when you add one, you lose a stop of light. So, my f/2.8 lens becomes f/4 when I add my tele-extender. Normally, I’d add it during the day when shooting sports, so losing that one stop of light isn’t an issue, but if I was shooting in low light, I would have to raise my ISO a bit more at f/4 than I would at f/2.8. Besides 1.4x, you’ll find 1.7x (you lose one-

and-a-half stops of light) and 2x (you lose two stops of light) extenders, as well, and you can begin to see some loss of image sharpness, so I stay away from those and just stick with the 1.4x. To keep from losing sharpness, make sure you buy a quality teleconverter (Sony, Nikon, and Canon all make very good ones).

TELECONVERTERS DON’T WORK WITH EVERY LENS

Before you buy a teleconverter, make sure it works with your lens—not every lens will work with a teleconverter. Look on the order page for the teleconverter and it will usually list the lenses that it either will or won’t work with.

You Need to Know About Lens Compression

You may have heard a lot of talk, especially when it comes to shooting portraits, about “lens compression” and how different focal lengths offer different types of lens compression. This is basically about one thing: the background behind your subject, and how far away it seems to be. For example, when you’re shooting a portrait of somebody at a wide angle, like 24mm or 35mm, the background is going to look like it’s way behind them. So, if you want it to look like a huge sweeping scene with lots of depth between your subject and the background, shoot at a wide angle. However, if you zoom your lens to around 200mm and shoot the same subject at around the same size (you’ll probably have to take a few steps back, since you just zoomed in), the background will now look quite a bit closer to your subject (even though your subject and the background are in the same place). For example, take a look at the examples shown above. In the wide-angle shot on

the left, the boats in the marina appear as though they are far behind our subject. But, in the shot using a 200mm telephoto lens on the right, the background looks like it’s fairly close behind her. When you zoom in tight like this, the compression effect the lens creates makes the distance between your subject and the background seem much shorter or more compressed.

FIXED-LENGTH PRIME LENSES VS. ZOOMS

This is going to send people who want to believe there’s a big difference into a rage, but I’ve talked directly with manufacturers who make both the prime and zoom lenses themselves, and they’ve told me, point blank, that with today’s higher-quality zoom lenses, there is no visible sharpness difference between zooms and primes.

How to Focus Your Lens to Infinity

If you’re going to try to shoot something that’s particularly hard to focus on (for example, let’s say you’re photographing the moon, or fireworks, or the Milky Way, or a lightning storm way off in the distance [and, by the way, that’s exactly where you want to be when photographing lightning—way, way off in the distance]), then you can set your focus to a setting called “infinity,” where everything way off in the distance will be in focus. There is a weird trick to “focusing to infinity” and here’s how it works: Start by focusing on something visible a little way in front of you, then switch your lens to manual focus mode (you do this on the lens itself—just switch from autofocus to manual). Now, turn the focusing ring on the lens itself (it’s usually down closer to the end of the lens) all the way to the right (on Nikons) or all the way to the left (on Canons), until you see the infinity symbol (∞) appear on the distance scale on the top of the lens. Once you get there (here comes the weird part), now turn it

back to the vertical line just before the infinity symbol. Okay, now you’re focused out to infinity and things off in the distance will be in sharp focus, even if they’re too far away to actually focus on (like the moon, or stars, or Mariah Carey).

Shoot at the F-Stop You Bought the Lens For

Fast lenses are pretty darn expensive these days (take a look at fast prime lenses, like the Sigma 85mm f/1.4 for Canon, which runs almost $1,200, or Nikon’s 85mm f/1.4, a hugely popular lens with wedding and portrait photographers, yet it costs around $1,600). If you bought one of those lenses (or any fast lens, like a zoom that’s f/2.8), you didn’t buy it to shoot it at f/8 or f/11. You paid that money for the f/1.4, so when you pull out that lens, you want to be shooting it at f/1.4. That’s the look, that’s the f-stop, and that’s the effect you paid for when you bought that expensive lens. So, make darn sure you’re getting your money’s worth by shooting it at the f-stop you bought it for.

WHEN TO USE THE MANUAL FOCUS RING

Most lenses let you turn off the autofocus feature and manually focus your lens, but a lot of today’s lenses actually let you do both: start by letting autofocus set your initial focus, but then override it and tweak your focus using the manual focus ring (usually found at the far end of the lens). There are photographers who do this every time (start with autofocus and then tweak it), but most (like myself) just rely on today’s excellent autofocus capabilities to do the work for them. If you want to tweak the focus yourself using the manual focus ring, just let autofocus do its thing first, and lock onto your subject before you start tweaking the manual focus ring.

The Deal on Lens Hoods

Besides making your lens look longer and “more professional,” a lens hood serves two very important roles (one advertised, one not as much): The first is that the lens hood helps keep lens flare from the sun, or from a flash, from getting to your lens and washing out your photos. Most good quality lenses these days come with one that is specifically engineered to work with that particular lens. The other, less publicized use is to protect your lens from getting scratched or broken while it’s slung over your shoulder as you walk around. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve banged my lens against a chair, the end of a table, even a wall when coming around a corner, but all I ever hear is the sound of plastic, and it bouncing right off. If I didn’t have a lens hood, I’m certain I would have had a number of scratched or broken lenses, but so far—not a one. I keep my lens hood on all the time. Besides, they look cool (don’t tell anyone I said that). By the way, you can turn your lens hood around,

facing back toward you, when storing it in your camera bag, or when it’s not in use.

WHEN YOU NEED TO FOCUS REALLY FAST, TURN THE FOCUS LIMIT SWITCH ON

Each time you use autofocus, your lens searches everything it sees, from a few inches in front of you to miles in the distance, and then it locks on what it thinks you’re aiming at. This takes just a second or two, but if what you’re shooting is really far away (you’re shooting sports or a bird up in a tree), you can switch your lens from Full focus to Limit, which tells it not to even try to focus on anything closer than around eight feet away. That way, it focuses even faster, so you don’t miss the shot.

You’re Probably Going to Lose Your Lens Hood

It’s the one thing that falls off your camera more than all the other parts combined. I have no idea why camera manufacturers have been able to pull off mini-miracles where you can make great photos literally in just candlelight and shoot 14 frames per second, with 4K video built right in, but the engineering feat of designing a lens hood that doesn’t fall off two or three times during a shoot (or walking around a city while on vacation) is simply out of their reach. So, to keep you from pondering this maddening thought at the worst possible time (or losing your lens hood altogether, as I have. Twice. By the way, the replacement was $47), do this instead: Buy a cheap roll of gaffer’s tape (it’s black tape that’s good and sticky, but you can peel it off cleanly and it doesn’t mess up your camera’s finish). Tear off a few small strips and apply them directly to the lens hood itself. Then, when you’re out shooting, tear off two short, thin pieces and use them to secure your lens hood to the lens itself.

Since I’ve been doing this, it hasn’t fallen off once. You don’t know how nice this is until it doesn’t happen any more. You can order gaffer’s tape online from dozens of places. B&H Photo has ProTapes Pro Gaffer Tape (2"x12 yards in black) for around 6 bucks and it will last you approximately 4 years, 2 months, and 16 days.

Keep Your Rear Element Clean

I imagine you already know it’s important to keep the front of your lens clean (use a microfiber cleaning cloth) because you get all kinds of junk on there (dust, fingerprints, etc.), but just as important, you want to keep the rear element of your lens clean (that’s the glass at the opposite end, where you attach the lens to your camera body. Yeah, that end). The reason why it’s important is any little thing that gets on this end gets magnified, so get a tiny smudge from your finger on it and now all your images look a little bit soft or blurry, and you think it’s a setting in your camera, or something wrong with your lens. Cleaning this is a two-step process: First, I recommend buying a “rocket blaster.” My favorite is from Giottos and you squeeze the bulb to blow air into your rear element (stop snickering), blowing out any surface dust or junk (you should also use this to blow any junk off the face of your lens). Then, take a microfiber cleaning cloth (not the end of your t-shirt) and, using a

circular motion, remove anything on the rear element glass itself. One more tip: If you’re taking a flight and pack a blower bulb in your camera bag, you can imagine how much TSA enjoys seeing something that looks like a rocket packed in there, so be prepared to be stopped for a bag inspection. When they ask what it’s for, I just tell them “it’s a medical device,” and you cannot believe how quickly they put it back in my bag and send me on my way.

Avoid Dust and Other Junk

When you get to your location to shoot, and you take off your camera body cap and rear lens cap so you can attach your lens, what do you do with those two caps? Toss them in your camera bag? Probably. Maybe you put them in your pants pocket or drop them in your purse. Essentially, you put them someplace where they can collect the maximum amount of dust and junk, and then later, when you’re packing up your gear, you pour that junk directly into your camera body and the rear element of your lens. If that sounds like a bad plan (it does, by the way), then try this instead: When you take off your camera body cap and your rear lens cap, don’t just toss them in your bag or pocket. First, screw them together. That’s right—you can screw them right into each other, so it’s sealed, and nothing gets inside. That way, if you do drop them in your camera bag (or wherever) while you’re shooting, when you do pack up, nothing gets inside your camera body or rear element.

SHUTTER SPEED: 1/1000 sec | F-STOP: F/4.5 | ISO: 100 | FOCAL LENGTH: 200mm

Chapter Three

Shooting Landscapes Like a Pro How to Create Stunning Scenic Images The most challenging thing about landscapes is that you have so little control over whether you’re going to get “the shot” or not. Sure, you can have all the right equipment, the best lenses, and you make that three-and-half-hour climb up to some lofty peak to a place so out of the way that few have ever photographed up there. Even though you hiked through the darkness of night, over rocky terrain, with the howling of wolves or God knows what out there (probably an infected Huacaya alpaca) to reach that gorgeous overlook and be set up and ready to shoot well before sunrise. You did everything right, and then . . . here comes the rain. Buckets of it. The kind that lasts all day, with a solid gray cloud cover as far as the eye can see (which is only about 10 feet because you’re socked in with fog and rain). No, my friend, there will be no beautiful sunrise image for you. Only tears. The silver lining? It’s raining, so the other photographers up there can’t see you cry, but it’s all for naught. Now you’ve got a grueling three-and-a-half-hour hike back to your car, through the driving rain and bitter cold (not just cold, mind you, bitter cold). And, because of the rain, it’s incredibly slippery going back down the mountain, but you press on, falling occasionally and hitting the frozen ground, spewing such a choice array of words it would make Lil Wayne blush. You climb and scamper and claw your way through the thick brush until you finally reach the trailhead, only to learn you lost your car keys during one of those slip-and-falls because that’s just how it goes when you’re a landscape photographer. We’re the Flying Dutchman of photography, whose entire success lies in the hands of someone else—Mother Nature—and she’s a cruel mistress, which is just a weird sentence to write, but nevertheless, this is our life. This is the life we’ve chosen, like those fishermen on TV’s Deadliest Catch, but without the chiseled chins and brawny physique of people who work on crab trawlers in the Bering Sea. Know the fate of our pictures is out of our hands, and it’s a lonely life of rain and long treacherous hikes, and more rain, and cold, and beef jerky, and infected alpacas and, well . . . I’m not sure this is turning out to be the

motivational intro I had originally planned, but I can tell you this: dress warm and take some salve with you. Those king crabs have some sharp pincers!

The Golden Rule of Landscape Photography

LOCATION: CANNON BEACH, OREGON

If you want to take landscape photos like the top pros, you’ve got to follow “the golden rule” of landscape photography, and that is: only shoot in golden light. Well, not necessarily “golden light,” but soft, beautiful, gorgeous light, and that only happens two times a day. These are the two times of day we shoot: (1) Thirty minutes or so before sunrise, and then for about 10 to 15 minutes after sunrise. At that point, the light starts to get harsh, the beautiful color is gone, and it’s time to pack up your gear and head to breakfast. The other time is (2) sunset, from around a full hour before to around an hour or so afterward, so you actually have a much longer shooting window at sunset. These are the two times of day when you get the soft, warm light and soft shadows that give professional-quality lighting for landscapes. So, what do you do the rest of the day? You can do some post-processing, you can sort your images, catch up on

sleep, head into town for some light shoplifting—anything but shooting. Now, can you take a decent shot during the harsh midday light? Sure. But, every time I see one I can’t help but think: “That’s not bad. Too bad she didn’t shoot it around dawn or at dusk—it could have been a great shot.” Go look at the work of any of the top landscape photographers. Check out their Instagram feeds and look at that one thing they all have in common—great light. You can be the photographer that shoots landscapes in crappy light, or you can follow the golden rule and make some really beautiful images. The choice is yours.

This Is Definitely Tripod/Cable Release Time

With landscapes, as you know (or you just learned on the previous page), you’re going to be mostly shooting before sunrise and around sunset. Both of these are times when there’s not much light, so your shutter is going to be open a lot longer than usual. If you try to hand-hold longer exposures like this, you’re going to have a ton of blurry photos. That’s why, for landscape photography, we are generally always shooting on a tripod—we need our camera to be absolutely, perfectly still while we’ve got that shutter open to get really sharp shots. So, this is absolutely tripod time for us. It’s kind of a must. Also, if you’re going to go through the trouble of carrying around and setting up a tripod, don’t go and press the shutter button with your finger. When you press the shutter, you’re going to move the camera, and that leads to blurry shots. That‘s why you either need to use a cable release (a cable that connects to your camera, so you can fire your shutter without actually touching your camera), or

if your camera has built-in wireless (and if you bought your camera within the last couple of years, it probably does), you can download the free app for your camera (made by each manufacturer—Sony, Fuji, Canon, Olympus, and Nikon all have free downloadable apps), and then you can fire your camera wirelessly right through the app. Doesn’t matter which method you use, as long as you use one.

My Favorite Lens for Landscapes

For the most part, landscape photography is a wide-angle game. You want to capture those big, wide, epic vistas and a wide-angle lens was born for that. But, which wide-angle lens? A lot of folks feel 24mm is about the right width, and that’s why a lot of landscape photographers choose a 24–70mm lens. But, I think there’s a better choice. If 24mm is the sweet spot, what is 70mm? Well, outside of maybe shooting a pano, you’re not going to use 70mm much or at all. You’re not going to use 50mm either. This is why I love a 16–35mm lens for landscapes. You’ve got that 24mm sweet spot covered in there, plus you’ve got a 35mm (which is still wide, so you can zoom in a little), but you also have a 16mm ultra-wide. This is great when you’ve got a strong foreground object—you can make a really epic shot and make the foreground objects larger than life. It’s so much more versatile and it’s lighter and a whole lot cheaper, especially if you get what I use—the 16–35mm f/4. You won’t be

shooting landscapes at f/2.8 (more like f/11), so save the money, the size, and the extra weight, and go with the f/4.

Which F-Stop to Use for Landscapes

If I had to pick one f-stop for shooting landscapes, it would be an easy choice: it would be f/11 hands-down. It’s an f-stop that lets you keep everything in focus throughout your image, from front to back, and on most lenses, f/11 is a pretty sharp f-stop overall. So, at f/11, you’re going to get a deep depth of field and a sharp result. At f/11, you’re going to need to shoot on a tripod because f/11 isn’t a “let a bunch of light in” type of f-stop, but you were going to be on a tripod anyway, so . . . there ya go.

WHY YOU NEED A WIDE-ANGLE LENS

If you’re shooting landscapes, you’ve probably come back more than once and been disappointed that the incredible vista you saw in person didn’t

transfer to your photos. It’s really tough to create a 2D photo that has the depth and feeling of being there. That’s why I recommend one of two things: (1) Don’t try to capture it all. That’s right, use a zoom lens and deliberately capture just a portion of the scene that suggests the whole. (2) Buy a super-wide-angle lens. Not a fisheye lens, a super-wide-angle lens (like a 12mm). If you’re trying to capture it all, a super-wide-angle (sometimes called ultra-wide-angle) lens is often just the trick you need to take in the big picture.

Keep from Destroying Part of Your Image

One of the biggest mistakes we can make with a landscape shot is letting something in it get so bright that it loses detail, which is called either “blowing out the highlights” or “clipping the highlights.” This means that an area in the image that’s too bright will have no detail, no pixels, no nuthin’. The most likely things to clip are clouds, snow-covered mountains (or just snow, in general)—really any bright areas in an image can be clipped. We can fix this in-camera (ideally, where you want to do it because if you clip an area badly, it can’t be fixed in post. Minor clipping, yes, but if it goes too far, it’s gone for good and your image is trashed). This is such a big issue that almost every camera has a built-in highlight warning, so you can lower your exposure enough to fix the problem. With this turned on, when you look at an image on the back of your camera, the clipped areas will “blink” (like a strobe light) or, depending on the make and model of your camera, it might put a blinking

zebra pattern over the areas. Since these blink on/off, they’re often referred to as “blinkies.” If these areas are of important detail, we have to deal with them. So, if you’re shooting in aperture priority mode, use exposure compensation to lower the exposure by 1/3 of a stop (the default on most cameras) and take a test shot. If you still see clipping, drop it another third, and so on until they’re gone. So, when do we not deal with the blinkies? If there’s just a small amount of clipping because you can usually fix that in post by dragging the Recovery slider to the left a bit. Now, if you shoot a shot where the sun is clearly visible, it’s going to clip, but since there’s not much detail on the surface of the sun, we let that go. However, if your clouds have the blinkies, that’s a different story, and we have to deal with it.

How to Add Depth to Your Landscape Photos

LOCATION: BANFF NATIONAL PARK, ALBERTA, CANADA

There’s a compositional technique pro landscape photographers use that helps to draw you into their image: the way they compose their shots gives them dimension. Their images don’t look flat. They have layers and that gives them depth. Here’s how you create layers: (1) Make sure your shot has something in the foreground. If shooting a lake, the shot doesn’t start in the water—it starts on the shore. Maybe there’s an interesting rock in the foreground, or some driftwood, or, like in the shot above, a gap in the ice—some visual object, right up front, that starts the viewer on their journey into the scene. (2) They have a middle ground. In the case of a sunset shot, this might be the ocean reflecting the sun, or in the shot above, it’s the area between that gap in the foreground and the mountains. And lastly, (3) they have a background. In the shot above, it’s the mountains and the sky. All three elements are here, creating depth and

visually leading you into the image. The next time you’re out shooting, ask yourself, “Where’s my foreground?” (because that’s the one critical thing most amateurs seem to forget—their shots are all middle and background). Keeping all three in mind when shooting will help you tell your story, lead the eye, and give your landscape shots layers of depth.

Where to Put the Horizon Line

LOCATION: MONUMENT VALLEY NAVAJO TRIBAL PARK, MONUMENT VALLEY, UTAH

The answer to this one is pretty easy: don’t take the amateur route and place your horizon in the dead center of the photo, or your landscape shots will always look like snapshots. Instead, there’s an easy rule we go by: If you have a great-looking sky, put your horizon one-third of the way from the bottom of your photo or lower to show more of the sky. If you have a boring, cloudless sky, hide it. We’d use the rule of thirds compositional method here, by mentally dividing the image into thirds, so when we compose the shot the land takes up 2/3 of the shot and your horizon line winds up in the top third of your frame, with only a third (or less) of the sky showing. Basically, we showcase the good parts (by showing more) and de-emphasize the boring parts. To help keep your horizon straight, use the Virtual Horizon feature on your camera (if your camera has it) or use a bubble level—a simple little gizmo that slides into your flash

hot shoe (where you’d attach an external flash). This bubble level is a miniversion of a bubble level you’d find at Home Depot and it lets you clearly see, in an instant, if your camera is level (and thus, your horizon line). The one I like is the Vello Low Profile Bubble Level for around $12. It’s really small and unobtrusive, but does a great job.

REALLY BORING SKY? BREAK THE RULE

If you’re shooting a landscape shot with a sky where nothing’s really happening, you can break the 1/3 from the top horizon line rule and eliminate as much of the sky from view as possible. Make it 7/8 ground and 1/8 sky, so the attention is totally off the sky, and onto the more interesting foreground.

The Secret to Shooting Sunsets

LOCATION: FAROE ISLANDS, DENMARK

Because you’re shooting into the sun, it can really throw your camera’s built-in light meter way off, and what looked so beautiful when you were standing there comes out . . . well . . . pretty lame. Luckily, there’s a simple trick to getting perfect sunset shots every time. The trick is to aim just above the setting sun itself (but make sure you can’t see the sun itself through your viewfinder), then hold your shutter button halfway down, which tells the camera to set the exposure for just what it sees in the viewfinder right now. This gives you a perfect sunset exposure, but don’t let go of that shutter button quite yet (keep it held down). Now you can move your camera and recompose the shot as you’d like it to look. By keeping that button held down, you’ve locked in that perfect exposure, and once everything looks good to you, just press the shutter button down the rest of the way and take the shot. You will have nailed the exposure

and captured the scene perfectly. Also, don’t pack up your gear right after the sun goes down because you’ll miss what is often the most magical light of all. Around 20 to 30 minutes after sunset, sometimes the clouds turn bright orange, or deep red, or purple, or if you’re lucky, a combination of all three, and some of my all-time best shots have been taken after everyone else has gone to dinner. Wait even longer (30 to 45 minutes or more after sunset), and the sky will often turn a vibrant, deep blue (not black, like the night—I’m talking blue—and it happens right before night). It’s called “blue hour,” but in reality, it only lasts about 10 or 12 minutes (I think the term “blue hour” was created by Mother Nature’s marketing department), but what wonderful twilight photos you can get then.

For Landscapes, You Need a Clear Subject

LOCATION: EL CAPITAN, YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, CALIFORNIA

One of the things that kills a lot of landscape shots is that there’s no clear subject, and for a landscape shot to really work, you have to be able to look at it and explain what you shot in one simple sentence. It’s a lighthouse. It’s that seagull on the rocks. It’s that old barn. It’s the palm trees on the beach. If you can’t explain your landscape shot in a short sentence like that, you don’t know what the subject is, and if you don’t know, people viewing your image won’t know either, and if that happens, the photo just isn’t working. Keep this in mind when you’re composing your landscape shots, and ask yourself the question, “What’s my subject?” If you can’t come up with a solid answer immediately (and it can’t be “it’s the whole scene”), it’s time to recompose your shot to find a clear subject. It makes all the difference in the world.

GETTING MORE INTERESTING SHOTS

You’ll make more interesting images if you can find a way to shoot angles we don’t see every day. For example, if your subject is mountains, if you shoot them from the road, that’s pretty much the standard view—that’s how we see mountains every day when we drive by them on the interstate. Instead, give people a view they don’t normally see—shoot from up high. Either drive up as high as you can on the mountain, or hike up as high as is safe, then set up your camera and shoot down on or across the mountains.

Where to Focus for Landscape Shots

LOCATION: LOFOTEN, NORWAY

When you’re taking a landscape shot, where do you focus your camera’s focal point (that red dot in the center of your viewfinder)? With landscape shots, the rule is simple: you want to focus about one-third of the way into the image. This gives you the widest possible range of focus throughout the image.

GET DOWN LOW

We shoot pretty much everything from a standing position. So, everything looks just like it would to anyone walking by that same spot. Try something from a different perspective—a view people wouldn’t normally see. Get down low—really, really low. If you go down on one knee, you see things

from a young child’s perspective. Sit on the ground, and you’ve got a toddler’s point of view. But if you really want to take it to the next level, lie on the ground and shoot, showing a perspective normally seen by squirrels (it gives you some idea why they’re so nervous all the time).

Getting the Star Filter Effect

LOCATION: LAKE TAHOE, NEVADA

There are special lens filters you can buy that can turn bright lights captured in your dusk and nighttime images into starbrights. However, if you don’t want to spring for a filter, you can get a similar effect right in-camera by doing just two things: (1) Choose an f-stop with the highest number you can, like f/22. And then, ideally, (2) position yourself so the sun is touching something (like a rooftop, or a mountain, or the horizon, or anything where part of the sun is visible and part is touching that certain “something”). That’s it.

Look for Clouds to Hold the Color

LOCATION: JOKULSARLON GLACIER LAGOON, ICELAND

When it comes to shooting landscapes at sunrise or sunset, clouds are your best friends. The reason why is because they hold the color in the sky. You need something for nature’s gradients of color, that happen right around sunrise or sunset, to play off of, and that something is clouds. If you’ve ever witnessed an empty, cloudless sky at sunrise or sunset, you know how lifeless it can be, and that’s why clouds are so important. If you have a really great sky at dawn or dusk, you’re going to come away with an amazing shot (yes, it makes that big a difference). So, don’t let a weather report that’s calling for clouds scare you off from your shoot. If it’s going to be cloudy, chances are you’re going to come home with something beautiful.

KEEPING YOUR GEAR DRY WHEN YOU’RE SHOOTING OUTDOORS

You can buy all sorts of sophisticated rain covers if you wind up shooting in rainy weather quite a bit (like Think Tank Photo’s Hydrophobia® covers), but the problem is that if the weather unexpectedly turns bad, chances are you won’t have that large rain cover in your camera bag. That’s why I keep a package of OP/TECH Rainsleeves in my camera bag at all times. They’re not fancy, but they’re small enough to always have with you in your bag. Plus, they’re cheap—you can get a pack of two for less than $7.

Composition: Using Negative Space

LOCATION: FAROE ISLANDS, DENMARK

There’s a old composition trick that works wonders: intentionally frame up the shot so you leave a portion of the image empty. That empty area (called negative space) draws the viewer’s eye directly to what you want them to see (like the top of this mountain, peeking through the clouds). This is a really strong device, and easier to frame up in many cases than you might think. Add this one to your landscape composition bag of tricks.

AN ADVANTAGE OF SHOOTING AT DAWN

If you’re shooting a scene with a lake, a pond, a bay, etc., in it, you’ll want to shoot at dawn (rather than at sunset) because that’s when you’re most

likely to get still water. If you want that smooth, glassy water reflection in a lake or pond, before dawn is when you’ll get it. As the morning goes on, the wind picks up, the water gets choppy and . . . well . . . you missed your chance.

Composition: Using Leading Lines

LOCATION: BANFF NATIONAL PARK, ALBERTA, CANADA

This is another technique we use to lead the viewer into our image. We find something—a path, a picket fence, a trailhead, a creek, a row of trees—that points the viewer in the direction we want them to journey into the image. This requires us to move around when we’re on location to make this work. For example, I was shooting up in Canada on a lake and there were rocks all over in the water. I walked around for 20 minutes until I found a few rocks that were aiming in the direction of the mountain I wanted to photograph. Sometimes it’s harder to find something like that and sometimes you walk up to a scene and you think: “Well, look at that—there’s my leading line!” It’s another really popular composition technique because it helps make your image stronger.

GETTING THE CLEAREST LANDSCAPES POSSIBLE

Have you ever seen a landscape photo that just has incredible clarity throughout the image? I’m not talking about sharpness—I’m talking clarity (like a total lack of haze, or fog, or any other atmospheric effect). Well, there’s a technique for getting that amazing clarity, and it’s simple: shoot in winter. The air is the clearest during wintertime, and it’s the perfect time of year to get those amazingly clear shots that you just can’t get any other time of year.

A Timesaving Pano Trick

When you come back from a shoot, if you shot some panos, you’re going to find out one of the challenges of shooting panos: finding them. When you open your images in Lightroom, or Adobe Bridge, or wherever, you’re looking at thumbnails of perhaps hundreds of images, and it’s a bit challenging to figure out where your panos start and end. I’ve completely forgotten that I have a pano in a particular shoot because they don’t jump out at you sometimes. But, there’s a simple trick that makes finding them a two-second job: Before you shoot your pano’s first frame, hold your finger up in front of your lens and take a shot (see the first frame above). Now, start shooting your pano. Once you shoot your last frame, hold two fingers up in front of the camera and take another shot (see the last frame above). Now, when you’re looking at your photos in a photo browser and you see one finger in a shot, you know there’s a pano starting there. So, select all the photos that appear between your onefinger shot and your two-finger shot—that’s your pano. Open those in

Photoshop or Lightroom and let it stitch them together into one single panoramic image for you. (I made a video for you on shooting and editing panos—see page 3.)

FAKING PANOS

You can crop a regular photo so it becomes a pano. In Lightroom, get the Crop Overlay tool in the Develop module, then from the Aspect pop-up menu, choose Enter Custom, and enter 2.39x1, and it will automatically crop to a cinematic-style pano. In Camera Raw, click-and-hold on the Crop tool, choose Custom, enter 2.39x1, and then click-and-drag out the cropping border for that same style of panoramic cropping.

The 7 Deadly Sins of Landscape Photography

©ADOBE STOCK/ALEXLMX

I’ve talked a lot about the things you need to do to make great landscape photos, but here’s what to avoid when taking them. If you can live your life avoiding these seven perilous pitfalls, your landscape shots will be blessed with the magical kiss of first morning light (not really, but they will certainly look a whole lot better). (1) Choppy Water: When we’re shooting a lake or a cozy harbor, what we’re looking for is that still, glassy water that creates a beautiful reflection. (2) Frozen Water in Waterfalls: You’re looking for that smooth, silky water —the silkier, the better—and that means you have to keep your shutter open for a long time (the longer it’s open, the smoother your

water will be). (3) Bald, Cloudless Skies: Most people find clouds beautiful (I sure do), but when it comes to landscape photography, they’re not just there to be pretty. (4) Harsh, Midday Sun: This light was designed to punish nature and the efforts of anyone who holds up a camera and aims it at any landscape. (5) A Crooked Horizon Line: If there is one thing that drives people crazy when they look at a photo, it’s a crooked horizon line. (6) Distracting Junk Near the Edges: Particularly deadly because it’s so easy to miss. (7) No Foreground Object: If your shot doesn’t have a strong foreground element, it’s pretty much sunk. And . . . don’t shoot photos of dead trees or tree stumps. Okay, I said there were just seven, but I couldn’t help myself.

Why You Need a Polarizer

You’ve probably heard that every landscape photographer should have a circular polarizing filter, which I actually think is true but not for the reasons you’ve heard, which are it makes skies bluer and more contrasty. Well, that’s kinda true if you use it right, but you can do a better job in Lightroom or Photoshop. What you want a polarizing filter for is to do something you can’t do in Lightroom or Photoshop—cut reflections. That’s the magic of a polarizing filter. Let’s take a stream, for example. The water in the stream reflects what’s above it (the sky), so you don’t see all the interesting rocks below the waterline, even if it’s really shallow. But add that polarizer and it cuts right through reflections, making for a much more interesting image. It removes glare on everything from leaves to shorelines to foliage to waterfalls. It cuts haze, it enhances color, it does lots of good stuff for not a lot of money.

WHAT TO SHOOT IN BAD WEATHER

If it’s an overcast or drizzly day, don’t spend it inside because you’ll miss some great shooting opportunities, like: (1) Right after the rain, while it’s still cloudy and dark, is the perfect time to shoot foliage, forests, mossy rivers, and waterfalls. (2) If it’s storming, there’s a good chance that right after the rain stops, the clouds will break, the sun will peek through, and there will be a very dramatic shot. (3) Before the storm “lets loose,” you can get some really amazing skies. And, (4) atmosphere (low-hanging clouds or fog) can make for some really interesting landscape photos (we’re talking soft, diffused light heaven).

Using a Graduated Neutral Density Filter

If the polarizing filter is the most important filter for landscape photographers, then a graduated neutral density filter has to be the second most important. This filter is designed to help you do something your camera can’t usually do on its own, and that is expose for the foreground without overexposing the sky. That’s why this filter has become so popular—it darkens the sky, but it’s how it does it that really creates a pleasing effect. This filter is graduated, so it’s darkest at the top of the sky, and then it graduates down to full transparency (like a gradient), so the ground doesn’t get darkened at all. The one I use is actually rectangular plastic, and I simply hold it up in front of my lens and then take the shot. I don’t use a lot of filters, in fact just a few, but this is one that makes a really big difference, and that’s why it’s with me on every landscape shoot.

Shooting Waterfalls

If you want smooth, silky water in your waterfall (and, yes, that is what you want), you’ll need to leave your shutter open a long time, which can be a challenge during daylight. You might need to keep it open for 10 seconds, 30 seconds, or even two or three minutes (depending on the light, what time of day you’re shooting, etc.). So, how do you keep your shutter open that long and not totally blow everything out? Use a neutral density (ND, for short) filter. They’re simply dark filters you screw onto the end of your lens to darken the scene, forcing your shutter to stay open longer to make a proper exposure. They come in different darknesses (if that’s even a word), so a 3-stop ND filter keeps your shutter open a bit longer, a 6-stop ND is twice as dark and keeps your shutter open twice as long, and a 10x (10-stop) keeps it open even longer. If you have more than one, you can stack them on top of each other for superlong exposures (I have a 3-stop and a 10-stop, and stacking them together

gives me those super-long exposures—my longest was 14 minutes). This process is slightly different depending on whether you’re shooting a DSLR or a mirrorless camera, but no matter which you use, you’re going to need to be on a tripod to get a sharp shot. If you’re shooting a mirrorless camera, it’s easy: put the filter on, switch to Bulb mode on your camera (if your exposure is more than 30 seconds), and then use either the ND Timer app (for iPhone), the ND Timer Filter app (for Android), or the PhotoPills app, which can tell you exactly how long to keep your shutter open. Now, just focus and shoot. Easy. If you’re shooting a DSLR, there are a few extra steps: (1) Focus first, then switch your lens to Manual focus, so it doesn’t keep trying to refocus. Then, (2) put on your ND filter, (3) switch to Bulb mode, and (4) cover your viewfinder, so light doesn’t leak in and ruin the shot (use gaffer’s tape). Now you can take your long-exposure, silky-waterfall shot.

Get the PhotoPills App

If I had to pick the most indispensable app for landscape photographers, it would have to be the PhotoPills app. It’s like having a photo assistant out in the field (and they just happen to be really great at math). Want to know exactly where the sun will rise on a particular day at a particular location? Check the app. Want to know the exact day you’ll have a full moon over the exact spot you want in Yosemite? Check the app. Need to know how long to leave your shutter open for a long exposure? Time lapse? Check, check. Need to know what time sunrise is? Check the app. What time blue hour starts? Check the app. But, it’s so much more than that—it has a built-in augmented reality feature that is just amazing. For example, if it’s mid-afternoon, but you want to know exactly where the Milky Way will be over your location, just hold your phone up to the sky, and it will superimpose the Milky Way over the current scene to show you exactly where you need to be to frame up the shot the way you want it later that night.

DON’T SET UP YOUR TRIPOD. NOT YET

As a landscape shooter, you’ll always be shooting in low light, so you’ll always be shooting on a tripod. But, don’t fall into the trap of walking up to a scene, setting up your tripod, and shooting. Before you set up your tripod, take a moment to simply walk around. View your subject from different angles, and chances are (in fact, it’s almost guaranteed) you’ll find a more interesting perspective in just a minute or two. Don’t take the walk-up shot.

SHUTTER SPEED: 89.0 sec | F-STOP: F/9 | ISO: 100 | FOCAL LENGTH: 16mm

Chapter Four

Shooting Travel Like a Pro How to Come Back with Images You’re Really Proud Of I’ve always said that one thing that really makes a travel photo successful is that when people see your images from your trip, it makes them want to go there. I think that’s really the mark. They see your images, and they picture how awesome it would be to be there themselves. This is why you should have affiliate links to the places you travel, so when they go there, you get a “referral fee” of sorts that’s tracked back to the link you gave out. For example, let’s say you stayed at the Waikiki Beach Marriott Resort & Spa in Hawaii. That Marriott is a super-popular hotel and, as such, they don’t need to pay you an affiliate fee to get people to stay there. They’re probably booked up for the next three years. That’s why, instead, you want to arrange an affiliate link from the Waykeke Maryyot hotel. It kinda sounds like the Waikiki Marriott, especially if you slur your words a bit when you’re mentioning it to them. Now, this might at first seem like a “bait and switch,” but it’s actually better than that (for you anyway) because it doesn’t get you just an affiliate fee, but it ensures that they won’t be coming back with anywhere near the same quality images you did. Why? Two reasons: (1) Waikiki and Waykeke are two very different places (especially since one is made up). This hotel is not actually on beautiful Waikiki beach, but a four-hour drive away on the rainy side of the island, in the dodgy part of unincorporated Waykeke, which leads the nation in lack of picturesque beauty and unsolved random murders. And, (2) bed bugs. The Waykeke Maryyot is crawling with them. So, when your friends are itching and scratching like mad, it’ll be hard for them to keep their cameras steady. There is no way they’re coming back with anything worth sharing, even on Facebook, thus forever securing your place in the annals of the Hawaii travel photography gods. This is, as they say in the fake travel industry, how you get stuff done. Mahalo.

In This Case, Less Gear Is More

I admit it, I’m a bit of a gear freak. But, the one time I definitely don’t go “big” is when I’m doing travel photography. You’re going to be hopping on and off of all sorts of transportation, from planes to buses to boats to taxis, and as the day goes on, the extra gear you’re lugging around somehow seems like it gets heavier and more of a hassle. After a while, it starts to impact your vacation and your photography. Instead, I recommend going light—take just what you need. Ideally, one lens or, if you must, two at the most. If I do take a second lens (and, by the way, once I’m on the trip I always wish that I hadn’t), I carry it in a very small Think Tank TurnStyle 10 sling bag (shown above. Consider taking a lens or sling bag because they’re smaller and they strap across your chest, making it much harder for anyone to swipe in big cities. But, they’re just big enough to hold your lens, some filters, cleaning cloth, and accessories). If you take just one lens (see the next page about that), you don’t have to carry a

camera bag at all. You put the lens on in the morning, and well . . . that’s it— you walk out the door, just you and your camera, and you’re set for the day. If you want to take a tripod, the same advice goes here—go light. Luckily, there are some incredibly small, lightweight travel tripods available today. I use the Leo travel tripod from British company 3 Legged Thing—it’s so small and light when it’s folded up. When you travel light like this, you’ll take more shots and enjoy the experience more because you’ll spend less time changing lenses, lugging gear, and messing around with your equipment.

My Favorite Travel Lenses

Like I mentioned, I like to keep my camera rig really light and simple when I’m on vacation because, after all, I’m on vacation (not on assignment). Ideally, I like to take just one lens that “does it all,” so I don’t have to carry a camera bag everywhere I go, and so I don’t have to be changing lenses all the time. One thing I’ve learned about taking two or more lenses with me when I travel is that whichever lens I have on right now won’t be the right one to have on when I turn the next corner. So, I’ll switch lenses and take a shot, but then I turn the next corner, and I need to switch back. I spend my day carrying and switching lenses and that’s not my idea of a fun vacation, so I try to go with just one lens. Right now (for full-frame cameras), my go-to lens is a Canon 24–240mm zoom for my mirrorless camera. I can cover everything from wide to long all in one lens. Sony makes a nice 24–240mm as well, and Nikon makes a great 28– 300mm. They’re all under $1,000, and all are small and lightweight. If you’re

shooting a crop-sensor camera, check out Nikon’s, or Sony’s, or Canon’s 18– 200mm for the same type of range, price, and portability. If you feel like you can’t live without taking a second lens, I would recommend a super-wide, which is great for shooting architecture, cityscapes, cathedrals, or palace interiors. For full-frame bodies, consider a 16–35mm or a 14–24mm, or for crop-sensor bodies, try something like a 10–20mm or a 12–24mm.

Shoot the Cliché Shots (and Show Them First!)

If you ask your average person to close their eyes and picture Paris, what do you think they see in their mind’s eye? The Eiffel Tower, right? How about London? Big Ben. Venice? A gondola. While these might seem a bit cliché to the photographer in us, to so many people, those would be the first things they would see when they visited those cities. That’s why, while you’re showing them all these cool artsy shots you took in the Le Marais area, they’re getting antsy waiting to see an Eiffel Tower shot. They want you to get past your stuff quickly, so they can see the shot that means “Paris” to them. First, you’ve got to shoot those obvious shots—those “cliché” shots. Then, when you get back, instead of making them wait, just show them the Eiffel Tower shot right up front. Get it out of the way at the beginning, and take away their anxiety, so they can actually relax and enjoy the shots you went to Paris (or wherever) to capture, since they saw the shot they “needed” to see already. I’ve seen this

play out so many times over the years. You’re flipping through the photos on your iPad, and they say, “Do you have any pictures of the Eiffel Tower?” Sigh. It is what it is. Don’t fight it. Roll with it. Show them what they want, so you can have them enjoy the beautiful shots you wanted to capture. By the way, if you’re wondering how I got this shot without it being absolutely packed with tourists and vendors, see page 78.

Shoot the Details to Suggest the Whole

Here’s a shot from Istanbul, Turkey, of the famous Sultan Ahmet Camii Mosque, also known as the Blue Mosque, taken just before sunset. The problem with capturing something so large is that you’re surrounded by distracting stuff—everything from tourists to street lamps—which makes it really hard to come back with something that doesn’t look like a snapshot. In my Shoot Like a Pro seminar tour (which was based on this book), I talk about how challenging it is shooting things like the exteriors of cathedrals, theaters, opera houses, and the like, because they’re not usually all by themselves on a flat, unobstructed piece of land. They’re usually downtown, and they’re usually surrounded by either construction/restoration equipment (cranes, barriers, and fences) or local businesses with signs, power lines, and such. It makes capturing a clean, unobstructed shot really tough. That’s why, instead, I recommend zooming in and focusing on just one important part of the

structure, like I did in the larger shot above. By only showing part of the building, a detail shot, you’re bringing the viewer something they wouldn’t see if they were just standing there. Plus, zooming in tight on an important detail area is a very powerful and dynamic way to present a large structure like this. We don’t need to capture the entire structure—your viewer’s mind fills in the missing parts. Frame up the image so you’re in tight enough to avoid all the distracting stuff and capture one part of the image that lets us imagine the rest.

Hiding Tourists, Cars, Buses, Etc.

This shot was taken in the heart of Rome, Italy. I was standing in a small park across the street from Altare della Patria (Altar of the Fatherland). No matter what time of day you’re standing in front of it, the view will pretty much always have cars, buses, scooters, and tourists right in front of it. Using Photoshop to clone all those cars and buses out of the way would be a nightmare because you’d have to rebuild a lot of the front of the building. So, instead, try this: get down really low. This totally changes your perspective and field of view, and uses the foreground grass to hide distracting stuff like cars and buses. It took me a few shots, and using Live View to check my positioning, to get it right, but it was worth it. By the way, you can use this same trick shooting your kid’s sporting events to hide the outfield fence on a baseball field, or the empty stands on a soccer field, or to hide anything in your line of sight when standing.

HOW TO KNOW WHAT TO SHOOT

Before you travel to a new city, do some research to see what other photographers have shot there and where they shot it. A great place to do this type of research is the websites of the big stock agencies (like Getty Images). If you’re looking to find the shots everybody else misses, visit 500px.com. Just search for the country or city you’re going to.

Another Trick for Hiding Tourists

This is Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, France. It’s one of the most amazing churches I’ve ever seen. It has these tall, amazing, stained glass windows on all sides, all the way around the entire church. Everything below the stained glass is gold leaf—the whole place is just stunning. It’s also very small and always very crowded. I’ve shown this shot many times to people who have been to SainteChapelle and the first thing they say to me is, “How in the world did you get this shot without the place being packed with tourists?” Now, one method is to be the first one in the door when they open in the morning. If you shoot quickly, you can grab a few shots when it’s empty, but it will fill up very soon, so you’ve got a short shooting window of opportunity without tourists. That doesn’t always work, but it’s worth a try. Another technique is to be the last one out at the end of the day. If there’s a tour of the building, I book the last one of the day if I can, and I try to lag behind to be the last one out. However,

for the shot you see above, I didn’t get to use either of those tricks. It was taken when Sainte-Chapelle was packed full of tourists. The trick here is to simply tilt your camera up enough so that you’re shooting just over the tops of their heads. They’re all still there, but I composed the shot so you can’t see them. If I lowered my lens barrel even a half-inch, you’d see the tops of their heads. You’d think viewers would say, “Where’s the bottom of the church?” but not a single one has (only when I tell them the trick do they realize the floor is missing). I’ve used this dozens of times, and it works like a charm.

How to Avoid Blurry Travel Shots

Nothing’s more heartbreaking than not having your timing just right when capturing something special—a spontaneous moment of life in the city or town you’re shooting in—so that when you open the shot, you see it’s blurry, soft, or just plain out of focus. This happens easily because when you’re shooting travel, the lighting isn’t consistent. If you take a quick shot and the lighting where you’re shooting (not where you’re standing—where you’re pointing your camera) is a little low, your shutter speed falls, and you’ve got a blurry photo. How do you get around this? With two simple settings on your camera. With this feature on, your amount of blurry photos will drop like a rock. The feature is called Auto ISO, and you’re not just going to turn it on, you’re going to set a minimum shutter speed, so your camera never lets it fall below that speed. I recommend 1/125 of a second as your minimum, and now your camera will make sure you never take a travel photo with a shutter speed slower than

1/125 of a second (well, as long as you have these two settings in place, right?). Your camera will automatically raise your ISO just enough to make sure you get a shutter speed of 1/125 of a second and that should be enough to get nice sharp shots. If you’re concerned about noise, don’t be. The only people that care about noise are other photographers. While photographers are all obsessed with stuff like noise, the rest of the world just wants to see a great picture. There’s an old saying: “If they notice the noise, the photo wasn’t good enough to begin with.” If you had a choice between a sharp photo that had some noise or a blurry one with no noise, which would you choose? Exactly. Give Auto ISO a try, so you can focus on getting the shot, and not worry about your shutter speed.

There’s a Picture in There Somewhere

This was taken inside Jackalope, one of the awesome gift shops in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Lots to shoot indoors and out, and the place is very camerafriendly. We’ve all been in situations where you see all this cool stuff in one place, but it’s so busy or crowded that it’s hard to think there’s even a shot there. In situations like this, it helps to remember that we don’t have to show everything we see in front of us—we can pick and choose what winds up in the frame. By zooming in tight, we only reveal what’s in our frame—which, in this case, was just this one vase—as if it were all alone. If I had moved even an inch to the right, you would have seen the price tag of the butterfly carving behind it. So, while I’m composing the shot, I’m moving a few inches in either direction to see which one gives the least-distracting image, and this was my favorite of the ones I took.

IF IT HAS BEEN “SHOT TO DEATH” TRY THIS . . .

Try shooting that “shot to death” monument or scene in some different way. Shoot a reflection of it in a window, or down low in a puddle. Shoot it from up high to capture a different angle or seldom-seen view. For a different photo than everybody else gets, shoot it from someplace that’s kind of a pain-in-the-butt to get to—something that takes more effort than a tourist is willing to take—and you’ll come back with more unique shots.

Working People into Your Travel Shots

LOCATION: DAXU ANCIENT TOWN, LI RIVER, GUILIN, CHINA

Do you want to improve your travel photos? Add more people to them. Don’t just come home with shots of buildings, cathedrals, and monuments—it’s the people that make the place. Nothing conveys the character and soul of a city more than its people, and that’s why many of the top travel photo pros work people into their shots. If, like me, you’re kind of uncomfortable with walking up to strangers on the street and asking to take their photo (especially when you don’t speak the language), you can still come away with some great shots by just asking the people you’re interacting with. For example, I’ll ask my tour guide to pose for a shot, or my taxi driver, or even a street vendor I just bought something from (sometimes I buy something inexpensive just to get a vendor to let me photograph them). Once you buy something, you’re not a tourist bothering them, you’re a customer, and they’re very likely to let you take a few

photos while they’re working. One thing I found that works well when you have a tour guide is while you’re walking through a city or village and see someone really interesting, ask the tour guide to ask them if it’s okay if you take their photo. I have had great success with this, and got some shots I never would have taken. Lastly, you can shoot “on the sly” and take candid shots when your subjects don’t realize you’re shooting them. Use a telephoto zoom lens, so you’re not in their line of sight, and be quick—put the camera up to your eye and fire, or they’ll look you straight out of shooting.

Getting People to Pose

LOCATION: AGRA, UTTAR PRADESH, INDIA

Candid shots of some of the locals make a nice addition to your travel shots, but if you have too many of them, they start to look less like travel photos and more like surveillance photos. To get those close-up, fascinating personal shots, you’ll need to get some of the locals to pose for you. One of the best tricks for getting people to stop what they’re doing and pose for you is to get them to let you take the first shot. When they see that I have a camera, I smile at them, hold up the camera with my finger on the shutter, and nod my head as if to say, “Is it okay if I take your picture?” Most of the time, they smile and nod back, and pause just long enough to let me snap one photo. Then, I immediately turn the camera around and show them the photo on the camera’s LCD. Once they see that photo on your LCD, it kind of breaks down a barrier because everybody loves a photo (especially if they’re the subject), and they’re

usually more than happy to pose for a few more.

SHOTS OF OLD PEOPLE AND KIDS CAN’T MISS

Take a look at the top travel magazines and you’ll see lots of shots of kids (I always get a nod of approval from a parent first) and old people. Keep an eye out for that old guy with that weathered, wrinkly face, and you’ll come away with a great people shot.

Hire a Model (It’s Cheaper Than You’d Think)

LOCATION: ROME, ITALY

How do the pros get those amazing shots of people in exotic locales? One of their tricks is to hire a local model. Now, if you think hiring a model is out of your budget, it’s less expensive than you’d think. Here’s a real world example: I hired a professional model for a shoot in New Mexico for $15 per hour (I also agreed to send her images from the shoot for her portfolio, which is very common). In Paris, I got a fantastic model for $100 for two hours (totally worth it). Some models new to the business will work for free in exchange for you making prints for their portfolio (the term for this in the business is TFP, which stands for “Time For Prints” [they are trading their time for your prints]), so ask your prospective model if they do TFP. So, where do you find models in other cities or foreign countries? Two places I’ve had great success with: Facebook (we found great models in Venice and Rome) and Instagram.

GET THAT MODEL RELEASE!

If you’ve hired a model, make certain to get your model to sign a model release, which enables you to use those shots for commercial work. You can find some sample model releases online, or you can use the app that I use for model releases: Easy Release (available on both iOS and Android). Without a model release, you’ll still be able to share the images on social media and in your portfolio, but you won’t be able to use them for commercial use.

Look for Vivid, Contrasting Colors

LOCATION: HIE SHRINE, NAGATACHŌ, CHIYODA, TOKYO, JAPAN

One thing to keep an eye out for when you’re shooting urban and travel shots is the bold, vivid colors of the city. You’ll often find brilliantly colored walls, doors (like a bold-colored wall, with a contrasting-colored door), shops, signs, cars, and bikes. One of my favorite urban shots was of a bright red Vespa scooter parked directly behind a bright yellow Lotus sports car. It almost looked set up, and I took dozens of shots of it because the colors were so vivid and perfectly matched. Keep your eyes peeled for brightly painted walls (especially if you find someone working in front of one, or waiting patiently for a bus with the wall in the background, or a bright car parked in front of a bright wall). If you’re looking for these colorful combinations while you’re out exploring, you’ll be surprised at how often they’ll reveal themselves to you (the ones shown here were all taken nearby each other in Tokyo). By the way, colors look more

saturated when they’re not in direct sunlight, so if it’s an overcast day, put “shooting colorful things” on your shot list for that day.

GIVE YOURSELF A THEME

To spark your creativity and show a city in a different light, give yourself a mini-assignment. Pick a topic and spend part of the day focusing on that subject. Some ideas are: charming street numbers; interesting doors and/or doorways; things that are one vivid color; weather vanes; flowers; charming local barns; close-ups of local architecture; coffee cups; little food signs in local markets; interesting columns, traffic signs, or street signs; mailboxes; or things that are a particular shape.

Look for Simplicity

LOCATION: SANTORINI, GREECE

The single thing that probably kills more travel shots than anything else (well, besides tourists) is clutter—all the distracting background items, foreground items, and just general stuff that gets in the way of a clean shot. So, one of the big secrets to creating powerful and dramatic urban and travel shots is to strive for simplicity. Look for simplicity in your backgrounds, in your people shots, in your architectural elements, in every aspect—the simpler the surroundings, the more powerful the impact. Go out shooting with that very goal in mind. Look for the absence of distraction. Frame your shots to avoid any clutter and noise, and watch for distracting elements that sneak into the top and sides of your frame. Avoid signs in your photos, because we read those first (unless the sign really adds to the overall image), and make a simple, clean shot. These will have great impact, not because of what they have, but because of what they

don’t have—lots of junk.

WHAT TIME TO SHOOT

Cities, like pretty much everything else, look best in beautiful light. I prefer to shoot early, right before sunrise when the light is soft and beautiful and the streets are empty, because the tourists aren’t out and about yet. The second best time to shoot is around dusk. You have nice, beautiful light, but the downside is you don’t have empty streets. If you have a cloudy day, you’ll have decent light most of the day, and the colors of the city will look more saturated and colorful, so don’t write those cloudy days off.

Don’t Forget to Shoot the Food

LOCATION: VIENNA, AUSTRIA

In every travel magazine feature about a charming city, you’ll find a photo or two of its food. Trying the local cuisine is one of the things people cite as one of their top reasons for traveling, so including shots of the food is really important. After you see the reaction of your friends and family when they see your great shot of a delicious-looking dish, you’ll always shoot the food from then on. There are a couple of simple tricks to make great-looking travel food shots: Your best opportunities are during the day, so you have nice, natural light (if you’re sitting inside away from the window, with lots of different tungsten lights with shadows going everywhere, it’s not going to look good). Ask to sit near a window or outside (preferably under an umbrella or awning). Next, remove distracting items from around the dish as much as possible. Use the lowest-numbered f-stop you can, zoom in tight, so you have a very shallow

depth of field, and don’t try to shoot the entire dish—just show a part of it. Lastly, tilt your camera at a 45° angle to help give the shot some energy, and then take the shot.

Create a Sense of Timelessness

LOCATION: CASTEL SANT’ANGELO, ROME, ITALY

If I could only tell you one thing that I believe has the biggest chance of taking your travel photos to the next level, it would be to choose and frame your shots to give them a sense of timelessness. If your travel shots have ads or billboards in them, or modern cars, or tourists dressed in modern clothing, they lose the romance and timelessness of the photo, and your images will wind up looking more like snapshots. If you can pick angles or frame up your images to hide all the modern stuff that puts a time stamp on them, you’ll come away with much stronger images. Here’s an example: My wife and I were in a small harbor, and I was looking to take a shot of one of the small boats lined up along the shore. I was walking past boat after boat after boat, and finally my wife asked, “What’s wrong with this boat? It looks nice.” I said, “It does. But, it also has a big Evinrude engine hanging off the back, and that kills the timelessness of the

shot. I want one with just oars, and nothing that would tip off that it was taken now. I want you to look at the shot and not know whether it was taken 1 year ago or 50 years ago.” She totally got it. Now, not only does this make your images look better, but it’s also fun seeking out timeless photos. You’ll wind up avoiding signs, and cars, and ads, and all sorts of things that would ruin your images anyway. Give timelessness a try—you won’t look back.

Consider Location Scouting First

LOCATION: BARCELONA, SPAIN

When I’m in a city I’ve never been to, my secret weapon is to simply take a two-or-three hour bus tour of the city. Here’s why this is so important: (1) You’ll go past all the major monuments, opera houses, and tourist attractions, and you’ll find out that some, many, or all of them are undergoing some sort of restoration. It’s like all of Europe is undergoing restoration at any given time. Well, once you see that the place you wanted to get up at dawn to shoot is surrounded by scaffolding, you can choose a better location for that morning’s shoot. (2) You’ll see buildings and places you didn’t know about that would make great shots! (3) You’ll get to spend a few hours without having your camera pressed up against your face, so you’ll get time to just enjoy the city, which is not a bad thing. I recommend leaving your camera in your hotel room safe, and just take your phone on this scouting mission. It has built-in GPS, so it will automatically tag any images you take with it with the exact location where you took the shot, so finding that spot again is easy. In short, I believe the couple of hours you spend scouting a city will help you come away with better images—including ones you didn’t have on your shot list—and you’ll enjoy your trip that much more.

Shooting without Tourists

LOCATION: PANTHEON, ROME, ITALY

My favorite time to shoot in a city is about 30 minutes before dawn, and one big reason is that the tourists aren’t around yet (about 45 minutes after this shot was taken, this area was absolutely packed with tourists and vendors). But, there are just so many other advantages to shooting early. First, the light is beautiful right before sunrise. The street lights are still on, which makes things look more interesting, and the streets are often still wet and reflective. Not only are there no tourists, there are few, if any, photographers. If some photographers do show up, they show up just late enough so they’ve already missed the good light. They show up at sunrise. That’s too late. You have to be there 30 minutes before sunrise. Sunrise marks “the beginning of the end” for your shoot. About 10 to 15 minutes after the sun does come up, the light starts to get harsh fast—the shadows turn hard, and it doesn’t look nearly as

beautiful as it did just a few minutes earlier. The first tourists of the day are starting to wander into your shots, and it’s all downhill from there. What’s interesting is that if you get up early, you get the great light and empty streets, and you can grab a nice breakfast after, and then head back to bed while everybody else shoots in the bad-light, tourist-filled area.

Take a Platypod Instead of a Tripod

LOCATION: ADMONT ABBEY LIBRARY, ADMONT, AUSTRIA

I don’t know what changed in the past few years, but if you set up a tripod to shoot in a city, you can almost count the seconds before a security guard comes up and tells you: “You can’t use that here.” It’s like there’s a war on tripods. So many monuments and attractions now post big “No Tripods!” signs right outside, before you even get to the front door. That’s one of the reasons I carry a Platypod Ultra with me everywhere I travel. It’s like a tripod without legs. It’s a small, lightweight, thin, incredibly strong metal base that you screw a ballhead onto to keep your camera steady, just like a tripod would, but without the security guard hate. I’ve shot with it in places all over the world where tripods are absolutely forbidden, but for some reason, since it doesn’t have legs, nobody seems to care. I love it for shooting low-angle shots (especially when I’m using a wide-angle lens—it makes everything look so

epic), and I like that I can put it in places where you couldn’t fit a tripod if they were allowed. I put my mirrorless or DSLR on mine with everything from a 16–35mm lens to my 70–200mm, and it’s solid as a rock (it’s made of commercial aircraft aluminum). Disclosure: Platypod is one of the sponsors of my weekly photography talk show, The Grid, and I’ve become friends with the inventor, Larry, who is a pediatrician and avid photographer. I don’t get a kickback or a fee or anything if you buy one, but I can tell you they have fans all over the world who dearly love their Platypod like I do, for the same reason I love it. You’ll dig them, too.

SHUTTER SPEED: 1/125 sec | F-STOP: F/8 | ISO: 100 | FOCAL LENGTH: 168mm

Chapter Five

Taking Portraits Like a Pro How to Make People Look Their Very Best in Pictures I think it was photographer and high-end retoucher Kristina Sherk who once said (I’m paraphrasing here) that our goals, as photographers and retouchers, aren’t to do crazy unrealistic retouches, or use lighting to make our subjects look like someone they’re not. Our job is to make our subjects look their very best—like they had a really good night’s sleep. Kristina must be very lucky because a lot of the folks the rest of the world gets to shoot . . . well . . . a good night’s sleep just might not be enough. Maybe two weeks. Hibernation perhaps. Like a good winter’s sleep. Let’s face it, most people look just this side of a zombie from The Walking Dead. Not me, mind you. I’m stunning. From every angle. I look like I’ve been in a coma for six months minimum. It’s the rest of the world. You know, “those people.” There aren’t enough tools in Photoshop to retouch those people. Me, like I said, I’m pristine. My hair is thick and lustrous, with a bouncy sheen. Wait, that rhymes. Pristine? Sheen? Come on, I wasn’t even trying and I’m already like a “level 3" rapper. In fact, I think it might be time for a rap about my shiny, bouncy, genetically healthy hair. [Rap to the tune of “Can’t Touch This” by MC Hammer.] Here goes: “Mymy-my-my hairdo makes me so boss. Makes me say, oh Dave Cross. Thank you for blessing me with shiny hair, like Chicken of the Sea. It looks good, even without conditioner. With super-dope hair like Batman’s commissioner. I’m known, as such. ‘Cause this is the hair, uh, you can’t muss.” Anyway—boom— there ya have it, sucka MCs! [Drops the mic. Word to ya mother. Insert various rap slang terms here.] Sorry, but all the rap slang I learned was literally back in the MC Hammer days, so that’s really all I’ve got to work with. Also, I should get five bonus points for trying to work in the phrase, “I’ve restored my hair’s natural protective barrier through a mixture of protein and Nutri-Keratin for silky smooth hair . . . ” but it’s harder to make that rhyme than you‘d think. Anyway, back to rap talk: Yo, peace, I’m out.

My Go-To Lens for Portraits

You can use any lens you already have to make a portrait, right? But there are certain lenses you could use that are much more flattering for portraits—so much so that they’re even referred to as “portrait lenses.” These portrait lenses are telephoto lenses, and the perspective and compression these longer lenses create make people look great. My go-to lens for portraits is a 70–200mm f/2.8, and I’m usually shooting at around 150mm to 200mm for the best results (the 70mm end is still a little too short for portraits, so I avoid shooting at 70mm). As much as I love the 70–200mm f/2.8 for portraits, it’s quite a heavy lens, and it’s pretty expensive. That’s why I recommend to friends to skip the f/2.8 version and get the 70–200mm f/4 instead. It’s about half the weight and half the cost, but it’s still a very sharp lens and it makes beautiful portraits because it’s more about the compression of shooting with a long lens than it is about the f-stop. Now, if you already have a lens in the 100mm on up range,

you’re set—just use those lenses at the longer end (like I said, that range of 150mm to 200mm is a nice sweet spot for portraits). Another advantage of shooting with a longer lens like this is that you have some distance—some breathing room between you and your subject. That way, you’re not right up in your subject’s face, and that bit of room makes most folks feel more comfortable, so that’s an added advantage of shooting with a longer lens. By the way, the 70–200mm works great on full-frame and crop-sensor camera bodies, and Canon, Nikon, Sony, Sigma, and Tamron all make nice, sharp lenses with longer ranges like this.

My Other Favorite Lens (85mm f/1.8)

My other go-to lens, and one that is beloved by so many portrait (and wedding) photographers is the 85mm f/1.8. At 85mm, it’s long enough to be a very flattering lens (in fact, I’d say that 85mm is where the “good portrait lens” range begins), plus at f/1.8, it can really make that background behind your subject beautifully soft and blurry (more on that on page 92, but just know that it’s a background master of a lens). The other awesome thing about it is that it’s small, lightweight, and surprisingly inexpensive. You can pick up a new one from Canon, Sony, or Nikon for around $500 (or even slightly less)—for a proquality lens, that is an insanely good price. Now, these lens manufacturers also make an f/1.4 and f/1.2 version of this 85mm lens as well, but they are: (a) a lot heavier, (b) a lot larger, and (c) way, way more expensive. Not even counting those three strikes against them, I have another big reason I wouldn’t tell a friend to buy either of those f/1.4 or f/1.2 lenses, and I cover that about

halfway down page 85. Here, let’s focus on the good stuff: you can get a fantastic portrait lens that is great for shooting in low-light situations, that’s lightweight and inexpensive, that’s sharp and awesome, and you will love this lens like you cannot believe.

Avoid Wide-Angle Lenses

You’ve read how there are certain lenses (portrait lenses) that really flatter your subject, but why can’t we just use our standard wide-angle lenses to take portraits? It’s because wide-angle lenses distort facial features, and it’s much harder to get a flattering portrait. Take a look at the side-by-side above. That’s the same person, taken with the same camera, and the same settings, in the same location, literally just a few seconds apart. The only difference between them is I took the shot on the left with a wide-angle lens (24mm) and the one on the right with my 70–200mm out at 150mm. See how much more flattering the shot is on the right? Now, it sometimes might be necessary to shoot with a wide-angle. For example, say you’re shooting a portrait of a NASCAR driver on the track in the pit area, and you want to get his car and the track behind him in the shot. This is called an “environmental portrait” where the location is nearly as important as the subject themselves. You’re telling the visual story of

that person in that location. In those cases, you’ll have to use a wide-angle. But, to keep the facial distortion to a minimum, try keeping your subject in the center of the frame and keep any body parts (arms, legs) away from the edges. At those edges, the distortion is its most obvious, so make sure you don’t put anyone at the edge of the frame or they will hate that shot, and probably you as well, with the passion of a thousand burning suns. So, here’s what I’d tell a friend: If you can help it, stay away from shooting portraits with a wide-angle. If you do wind up having to take an environmental portrait with a wide-angle lens, you can still make a really cool-looking image, but your subject might not look as awesome as they would with a longer lens. It’s a tradeoff.

Which F-Stop (Aperture Setting) to Use

This decision is actually a pretty easy one. If I’m shooting in natural light, or even existing light indoors, I use the lowest numbered f-stop my lens will allow. Depending on which lens you’re using, the lowest numbered f-stop you can choose might be f/4 or f/2.8. Using a low-numbered f-stop like that helps blur the background behind your subject, which helps simplify your portrait. By blurring the background, it hides distracting things in it and helps create separation, so your subject stands out from the background (and it just overall looks more professional. More on this on page 92). Now, you might have a lens that goes as low as f/1.8 or lower, but I don’t go lower than f/1.8. At lower fstops, like f/1.4 or f/1.2, if you don’t nail your focus every time, your subject will be either a bit out of focus or way out of focus, and you’ll wind up with lots of shots going straight in the trash. So, I stay away from those super-low fstops. Now, there are people who can shoot at f/1.2 all day and get incredibly sharp shots. There’s some evidence to suggest they’re, in fact, aliens wearing

human skins. Be that as it may, I’d tell a friend, at least for now, to stay away from those super-fast f-stops, at least until they’re recruited by other aliens.

THE F-STOP FOR SHOOTING IN A STUDIO

If you’re shooting portraits in the studio, this is an easy choice: I go with f/11. At f/11, everything will be in sharp focus, and most studio backgrounds (canvas, seamless paper) won’t need to be out of focus, like distracting and busy backgrounds that we have to deal with when we’re outside.

How and Where to Focus

It’s the eyes. If the eyes aren’t sharp and in focus, you’ll wind up tossing the shot in the trash. Luckily, there’s a focus technique for portraits that we use in every case (with one exception) that works incredibly well: it’s called “focus and recompose.” Start by aiming your viewfinder’s center focus point (or onscreen using Live View) directly over whichever eye is closest to the camera. When it’s right over their eye, hold your shutter button halfway down, which locks the focus on their eye. Keep holding it halfway down, then recompose the shot however you’d like, and then take the shot. Your focus will be spot on because you locked that focus down from the start. That’s it—aim at their eye, hold the shutter button halfway down, frame up the shot the way you’d like, then take the shot. Easy peasy. Now, that being said, a lot of newer cameras these days have an incredibly helpful feature called “Eye Autofocus,” which uses facial detection to automatically find and focus on your subject’s eye for

you. If your camera has this, by all means, turn it on as it’ll do that whole portrait focusing job for you. Now, besides the auto eye focus feature, there is one exception to the standard focus and recompose technique and that’s when you’re shooting at super-low f-stops, like f/1.8, f/1.4, or f/1.2. Focus and recompose doesn’t work for those because the depth of field (the area in focus) is so shallow that you’re more than likely to get blurry shots. With those faster lenses, you compose the shot first. Then, you use the dial or joystick on the back of your camera to manually move the focus point over your subject’s eye, and then when you’re ready, you take the shot. So, it’s the opposite of focus and recompose. It’s compose, then move the focus point. It’s a little more work, but it works.

Capturing Genuine Expressions

I doubt you’ll ever hear someone say, “I’m hoping for a portrait where I look posed.” No one wants a stiff-looking, posed portrait; everyone wants one that looks real. One that captures their personality and has a genuine expression. You want to create a portrait where someone who knows the subject takes one look at it and says, “Wow, that is so Andrea!” So, how do you get genuine expressions? There are two things you need to do: First, connect with your subject before you start shooting. This is a human being in front of your lens. They’re probably not really comfortable having their portrait taken (most folks are either self-conscious, nervous, or both), so they’re going to be kind of stiff and awkward, especially at first. Before you pick up your camera (don’t do this with a camera in hand, because even if it’s at your side, they never know when you’re going to quickly bring it to your eye to take a shot), take a few minutes to get to know your subject. They need to feel comfortable with you, and once

they do, it will help like you cannot imagine. Then, go ahead and let them pose (or pose them to get started). After you take a few posed shots, keep the camera to your eye and start talking to them about anything: “Do you have any children? Two? Great. Boy and girl? Okay, which one do you like best?” Now, get ready to take the shot because you’re about to get a real expression— laughter, thoughtfulness, something. It’s in those shots between the poses when real life happens. Real expressions. Real emotion. Laughter, genuine smiles, or even anger if you bring up their favorite football team (unless their team is the Patriots, in which case they’ll just start bragging incessantly, so it’s perfectly acceptable to cancel the rest of the session without refunding their money. This is in the official NFL rule book).

Where to Position Your Camera

Next time you see someone who is pretty good at taking selfies (spoiler alert: any teen), take a look at where they’re holding their camera when they take that selfie. They’re holding it out with one arm up higher than their head, tilting it back down at themselves, right? Why are they holding it up high like that? It’s because they’ve learned that it makes them look better. It strengthens their jawline, it stretches out their skin, it hides any double chin action—it simply is a much more flattering angle. That’s why before selfies were even born, we were already taking our portrait shots at, or ideally just above, our subject’s eye level. If you shoot from a slightly higher angle, angling down just a bit, you’re going to get a more flattering portrait. Simple as that. So, whether your subject is standing or sitting, position your camera angle so it’s at the very least at eye level, but ideally, a few inches higher and tilting a bit down at them for a more flattering look.

Positioning Your Subject in the Frame

When people first start taking portraits, they put everybody right in the center of the frame. That’s not the worst place in the world to put a subject, but it’s not a very dynamic place for them to be. It’s centered. It’s predictable. It’s boring. It’s what beginners do. For a more professional, more dynamic, and more interesting look, we compose the shot so our subject isn’t in the center of the frame. We have them over in the left third of the frame (like you see here) or in the right third. This also has the added benefit of creating what we compositionally call “negative space,” which is an area of the photo where there’s really nothing interesting going on—it’s kind of a blank area of nothingness, but that empty area helps lead your viewer’s eye instantly to your subject.

Don’t Leave Too Much Space Above Heads

One of the most common compositional mistakes I see in portraits is when the photographer left too much space above their subject’s head, like you see here on the left. Unless this image is going on the cover of a magazine, so you intentionally left space up there to put the magazine’s name, that’s way, way too much headroom up there. Your subject’s eyes should not be centered vertically in the frame. Their eyes should appear in the top third of it, more like what you see here on the right.

DON’T CUT OFF THEIR KNEES OR ELBOWS

Another compositional mistake to avoid is cutting your subjects off at their joints. Try to frame up your shots so you’re not cutting anyone off at the

knees, ankles, wrists, or elbows. We’re subconsciously uncomfortable when viewing images that are cut off at the joints, and it’s such an easy thing to avoid–you just have to keep an eye out for it.

Popular Tip for Framing Portraits

A very popular and modern way of composing portraits is to frame up the shot so you cut off the top of your subject’s head. This creates a very close-up, intimate portrait as your subject is nearly filling the frame. You’ll see this look everywhere today—on the web, in magazines, in ads—because it’s a very contemporary way to frame up your portrait. You don’t do this for every shot, of course, but when you really want to create that close-up connection, this can help do the trick. Also, it’s important to not just cut off a tiny bit of their head or it will look like a mistake, and you’ll hear a friend say something like, “Hey, that’s a really nice shot. Too bad you cut off the top of her head.” You have to take off enough, around 1/3 to 2/3, so they can instantly tell it was intentional.

THE BACKGROUND LIGHTING RULE

When it comes to backgrounds, there’s another simple rule you can follow that will keep you out of trouble. When you’re choosing a simple background to shoot on, make sure your background is not brighter than your subject (in fact, darker is better because a dark subject on a bright background rarely works).

Blurring the Background Behind Your Subject

When we’re shooting portraits outdoors, we usually try to keep the background simple, with the least amount of distracting things back there as possible. The simpler the background, the stronger your portrait will be, so that’s why blurring the background is such a popular choice—it hides lots of distracting stuff. There are three simple things you do to get that gloriously soft, creamy, awesomely blurry background behind your subject, and they all work together to give you that look. They are: (1) Put some distance between your subject and the background. If they’re standing right in front of a wall, there’s not enough depth between them and the wall for it to be out of focus. Move them 8 or 10 feet in front of that wall, and now you can easily make it blurry. The farther they are from the background, the blurrier it will be. (2) Use an f-stop that helps make the background blurry, like f/4 or f/2.8, or lower. (3) Zoom in tight with a telephoto lens, one that’s 85mm or longer (so 85mm, 105mm,

150mm, 200mm, or anywhere in between or longer). Put those three things together (distance from the background, low-number f-stop, and zoom in tight), and you will have a blurry background like a boss!

Getting Great Light Outdoors

Although there’s plenty of light for shooting portraits outdoors in the middle of the day, most of it is very direct and will wind up casting hard, unflattering shadows on your subject’s face (not to mention, they’ll usually be squinting, sweating, have shiny spots on their skin, or all three). So, how do you get great outdoor portraits in the afternoon sun? There are a couple of ways: One is to simply move your subject into the shade where the light is softer, and the shadows are less prominent and much softer. Now, don’t move into a cave— just move to a shady area near the direct sunlight (typical places include under a large tree, under the overhang of a building or house, on the porch of a house, under an umbrella, etc.). Just find a place you’d normally go to get out of the sun on a hot day, and you’re ready to get portraits where your subject isn’t squinting, and the light is soft and flattering. The other method works great when there isn’t any nearby shade (but, of course, you can use this

technique even if there is shade because it’s pretty awesome). Just have a friend hold a 1-stop diffuser between your subject and the sun. It’s like you’re creating your own shade anywhere, but the advantage is it doesn’t block the sunlight, it just spreads and softens it. So, you still get nice directional light, but it’s just not harsh. It’s like putting a softbox over the sun. Best of all, these diffusers are inexpensive. I’ve seen them online as cheap as $9 (which is just slightly more than two Taco Bell’s Nachos BellGrande®), but I prefer the diffuser that comes with the Westcott 5-in-1 Reflector Disc because you also get some reflectors, which you’ll wind up needing, too (and even though it’s around $40, that’s just a little more than Outback Steakhouse’s Kookaburra Wings® Party Platter, so . . . there’s that).

Shooting in Direct Sunlight

Sometimes we’re in situations where we don’t have any open shade nearby, and we don’t have a diffuser to help make the sunlight soft. In those cases, we have a killer trick to still get a great shot, even if you’re shooting right out in direct mid-day sun. Start by putting your subject’s back to the sun, which is now going to act like a hair light—like a second light, giving separation from the background and adding interest to the image. Now, when you put the sun to someone’s back, that usually makes them a silhouette. Well, not to your naked eye because your eyes will automatically adjust for the wide range of light. But, your camera’s sensor is not nearly as awesome as the human eye, so if your subject is backlit, they usually come out looking almost like a silhouette out of your camera. Here’s the trick: If you’re shooting in aperture priority mode on your camera (and I’m hoping you are—it’s my go-to for shooting outdoor portraits; see page 20), then you can use your camera’s exposure

compensation dial to intentionally overexposure the scene by one stop. So, what will that do? Well, it will make the background one stop brighter, right? Yup. What else? It will make your subject one stop brighter, so that will brighten their face up almost like you set up a flash or a reflector. But, you didn’t. You did it all with just one simple setting—you overexposed the image. One stop brighter might not always do it; you might have to do a stop and a quarter, or a stop and half, but it will only take a test shot or two before you have it dialed in right. Try this once, you’ll use it forever.

Using Reflectors and Which Color to Use

A lot of photographers like shooting outdoor portraits on very cloudy days because you don’t have any harsh sunlight—it’s hidden behind the clouds. However, like when shooting in the shade, the light tends to be kind of flat. So, on a cloudy day, or if your subject is in the shade, we sometimes use a reflector to redirect some light onto their face, or just onto the shady side of their face, so it doesn’t get too shady and lose detail. But, there are silver reflectors, white ones, black ones, and gold ones (among others). Which do you use when? White reflectors are the least reflective, and with portraits, I will sometimes have a friend or assistant hold one at chest height right in front of my subject (but visibly out of my shot, of course) to bounce some light into

their eyes, so they don’t have dark eye sockets or eyes, and to open the shadows up under their chin. It doesn’t do a ton, but it’s worth doing. If I really need to reflect some light, either onto one side of my subject’s face or to light the face altogether (if they’re in the shade or on a cloudy day), then I use a silver reflector. Silver reflects the most light, and it’s the most powerful. Gold is generally used later in the day because the light that hits it turns gold (well, a very warm color anyway). That looks great around sunset, but it looks weird on a bright, sunny day to see gold light on your subject. A black reflector does the opposite of filling in shadows—it creates them (see page 96 for how to use a black reflector). Also, make sure to see page 97 for where to place your reflector (because most folks do it all wrong).

When to Use a Black Reflector

If we’re shooting outdoors, we generally avoid shooting in direct sunlight because it creates harsh shadows, squinting subjects, and lots of bad stuff. So, we look for some open shade—under an awning, or on a porch, or under a tree, or the side of a building, any place where we can get soft, even light. While it’s usually preferable to shooting out in the direct sun because the light is soft and even, it’s the “even” part we need to deal with. The lighting in the shade is kind of flat, but if you have a black reflector, you can easily fix that. Just put one up near the side of your subject’s face, and it creates a shadow on that side of the face. Check out the example above. On the left, our subject is in open shade on the side of a building, and on the right, I had a friend hold up a black reflector on the right side of the subject’s face. Just look at the wonderful shadows it created. Such a simple thing, but shadows are so important in portraiture and it makes all the difference in the world. Also,

shooting portraits on cloudy days is another alternative if you don’t have open shade around. Cloud cover is nature’s own softbox, but like shooting in the shade, the result is often very flat lighting, so you can use this black reflector trick on cloudy days, too.

HOW TO GET GREAT SKIN TONES IN PORTRAITS

The trick is to get your color right in-camera. If you shoot someone in the shade, and you’re using Auto White Balance, their skin is going to look bluish (and most people don’t look good with bluish skin). It’s an easy fix: switch your White Balance to Shade, and their skin tone will now look great. On cloudy days, choose Cloudy.

When to Use a Reflector and How to Aim It

When we’re shooting outdoors and our subject’s back is to the sun, we can use a reflector to bounce sunlight back onto them to light their face, so they’re not in silhouette. However, if you’ve ever watched somebody aim a reflector at their subject, they usually hold it down low in front of them and bounce the sunlight up onto their subject. That works fine, if you’re just trying to fill in some shadows, but if your reflector is providing most of the light (your subject is in the shade), then you’re “up-lighting” your subject (kind of like they do in monster movies to make the monster look more menacing, which probably isn’t the look you’re going for, unless of course, you’re lighting your mother-in-law. Not my mother-in-law, mind you, as she is a saint, but ya know, other mothersin-law). Anyway, people generally look best when lit from above, so the person holding your reflector will need to hold it up high, above their head, so they bounce the light back onto your subject from up there, which is definitely more

flattering. Have your friend hold the reflector up high, and then have them slowly tip it down until you see it starting to light your subject’s face. Have them move the reflector back and forth and, as they do, you can see when the light hits the reflector just right because you’ll see the light on your subject’s face. When it looks good, have them hold it there while you make the shot. When you’re done, have them keep holding it up high over their head for another minute or two—just to mess with them.

Using Window Light

What’s the pros’ trick for getting great portrait light indoors? Window light. Window light portraits were made famous in paintings by the old Dutch masters, and we’ve been in love with that light ever since. But, just plopping someone in front of a clear window isn’t going to turn that harsh, nasty sunlight into soft, beautiful wrapping light. The trick the Dutch masters used was to place their subjects at a north-facing window because they don’t get direct light. The problem here? Everybody doesn’t have a north-facing window. That’s why we have some tricks we can use to get beautiful light from any window. First, make sure you’re shooting parallel to the window, like I’m doing above, so you get those wonderful soft shadows on your subject’s face—that’s what we’re going for with window light. Now, simply move your subject back away from the window. The light is harshest nearest the window, so as you move your subject back away from it, the light and shadows get much softer. An even

better place to position your subject (if possible) is behind the end of the window—the light is super-soft and wrapping back there. Pick one of those two spots, and you can’t go wrong.

THE “SHOWER CURTAIN LINER” TRICK

If you don’t have enough room to move your subject back or behind the window, try this: buy a shower curtain liner (not a shower curtain; the white translucent liner that goes behind it), tape that (using gaffer’s tape) up over the window, and it turns that nasty, harsh window light into a beautiful softbox. Works like a charm.

Using Seamless Backgrounds

Next time you’re at an airport, bookstore, etc., stop by the magazine rack and take a look at the magazines that have a portrait on their cover. A lot of magazines feature people on the cover because people are drawn to photographs of people (and that sells more magazines). They also use great photographers for these covers—masters of portraiture. Now, look at the backgrounds on these magazine covers. Many of them will be shot on a background of seamless paper. Seamless paper creates such a simple, clean look, they’re available in about every imaginable color, and best of all, they’re incredibly inexpensive. A 53"x36' roll of seamless paper will run you about $22. That’s pretty darn cheap! And, you can get wider rolls (I generally use 9’ [107"]-wide rolls in my studio—it’s just easier when you don’t have to worry about seeing the edges of the seamless paper in the shot—and even then, it’s still only around $56). I recommended starting with a roll of white seamless

because it looks solid white when you aim a flash at it. It looks light gray in photos if you don’t. If you move your subject 8 or 10 feet in front of it, and don’t light it, it looks dark gray. It’s like three rolls in one. I use the Savage Widetone Seamless Background Paper (#01 Super White, 107"x36') from B&H Photo. Okay, so how do you hold this seamless paper up? You can get an inexpensive set of stands with a center bar to hold it for around $70. Again, cheap. Well, cheap in the realm of photography, but still . . . kinda cheap.

Using Painted Backdrops

Painted canvas backgrounds are another background you’ll see a lot in portraits and headshots. They’re not as inexpensive as seamless paper, but they have such a nice professional look. You can get a decent hand-painted canvas background for around $140 (and on up). I get mine from a company called Gravity Backdrops, and these are incredibly popular with pros because they look awesome and their prices are really great, especially for the quality. These backgrounds add texture and dimension to your portraits, without distracting from the subject. You hold them up using the same type of background stand you use for your seamless paper rolls (see page 99), and they look great if you add a flash on the background, or if you let some of the light during a window light shoot spill onto that background.

Taking Great Photos of Newborn Babies

By now you’ve probably heard how hard it is to photograph babies. That may be true, but newborn babies usually have a distinct advantage—they’re very, very sleepy. That’s right, newborns spend most of their days sleeping, so getting great shots of them is easier than you’d think, but you have to put them in the right setting or everyone who looks at the photos will say something along the lines of, “Aw, too bad she was asleep.” Generally, people like babies to be wide awake and smiling in photos, but there’s a very popular brand of newborn photography where the baby and mom (or dad) are sharing a quiet moment, and it really sets the stage for a touching portrait. I saw this first-hand when David Ziser (the world-class wedding and portrait photographer) spent one evening photographing my newborn daughter, Kira. Now, David had a huge advantage because my daughter just happened to be the cutest little baby in the whole wide world, but he did stack the deck in his favor with a simple, but

extremely effective, technique—he had my wife and I both wear long-sleeved black turtleneck shirts (you can find these at Target). Then, he photographed Kira as my wife held her in her arms (I took a turn as well). David shot very tight (zoomed in), so what you basically got was a sweet little baby resting peacefully in her parent’s arms. You can use natural window light or a flash with a softbox (more on this in Chapter 6) to create that soft, wrapping light that makes babies (and their parents) look wonderful.

SHUTTER SPEED: 1/125 sec | F-STOP: F/7.1 | ISO: 100 | FOCAL LENGTH: 140mm

Chapter Six

Using Your Flash Like a Pro If You’re Not in Love with Using Flash, That’s About to Change I’m going to ask you a question about using flash, and I want you to be honest in your answer. You don’t have to worry about lying to me because . . . well, I’m not there with you. Oh, I’m there spiritually and metaphysically and every other way I could possibly not actually be there with you, but nevertheless, if you lie in your answer, I’ll never know. Well, I might know (hey, you don’t know who I know). It could get back to me through the grapevine, and that would be really embarrassing for both of us, so before you start telling some big one, I think you need to really think this thing through. Actually, wait. If you have to put a lot of thought into whether you should lie or not about something as trivial as whether you love the results you’re getting from your portraits taken with flash, I’m not sure you can be trusted with bigger issues, like “Where were you on the night of June eleventh?” and “Why are your fingerprints on this knife?” and “Why do you need your attorney present before answering any further questions?” I have to admit, I’m a little taken aback by all this. I thought you and I were kind of bonding here in the sixth chapter, but now I’m starting to question everything you’ve told me thus far. How are we going to build on this relationship if we don’t have trust? It’s the cornerstone of everything we wanted to do together, so I need you to be straight with me. Here goes: Do you love the portraits you’re making with your flash? You don’t have to tell me. I already know. You do not love those images. How do I know? It’s simple. You don’t own a flash. Am I right? I am? I knew it! See, we’re back on track. Look, I’ll be straight with you: at this time where we’re all so politically divided, the one thing that we can rally around, the one thing that has the power to finally bring us together, is the fact that none of us are happy with the results we’re getting from our portraits with flash. Well, my friends, that’s all about to change (or, maybe I’m lying, but I doubt it).

Pop-Up Flash: Use It as a Weapon

The pop-up flash built into your digital camera is designed to do one thing: give you the flattest, harshest, most unflattering light modern-day man has ever created. Here are some of the reasons to avoid using it: (1) Its face itself (where the light comes out) is very tiny and the smaller the light source, the harsher the light it produces. (2) Since the flash is positioned right above your camera’s lens, you get the same quality and angle of light that a miner gets from the light on the front of his helmet. (3) Using a pop-up flash is almost a 100% guarantee that your subject will have red eye because the flash is mounted so close to and directly above the lens. (4) Because the flash hits your subject straight on, they tend to look very flat and lack dimension all around. (5) You have little control over the light, where it goes, or how it lands. It’s like a lighting grenade. These are the reasons so many people are disappointed with how their shots look using their camera’s flash, and it’s why

using it should be absolutely, positively a last resort, only done in the most desperate of situations. What should you use instead? That’s on the next page.

LOWERING THE POWER OF YOUR POP-UP FLASH

Most cameras let you lower your pop-up flash’s power to use it as a fill flash. On a Nikon, hold down the flash mode button, then turn the subcommand dial so you see a negative number in the control panel on top. On a Canon, press the ISO/flash exposure compensation button and turn the quick control dial until you see a negative number in the top LCD.

Why You Need an Off-Camera Flash

If you want to get pro-quality results from using flash, you’re going to need to get a dedicated flash unit (like the one shown above). These are often referred to as a “speedlight” or a “hot shoe flash” or an “off-camera flash” or just a “flash.” Nobody actually calls that pop-up thing on top of your camera a “flash.” We call it, “the ugly maker.” So, when you hear a photographer talk about “flash,” they’re talking about one of these dedicated flash units. What makes these dedicated flashes so great is: (a) You can take it off your camera to create directional light. This is huge. (b) You can angle it upward (you’ll see why that matters later in this chapter).

(c) You can add accessories over the front of it and, in many situations, that alone can make a big difference. (d) You get more control, a more powerful flash, and most importantly, the chance for a much better quality of light. It’s the starting point for everything good that happens with flash.

IF YOU DON’T ALREADY OWN A DEDICATED FLASH

Nikon, Sony, and Canon all make really great, pro-quality dedicated flashes, but if you’re not sure you want to plunk down around $600 for one of those, you might consider a Yongnuo or Godox speedlight for less than $100. They actually work really well, they’re super-popular, and they do a pretty darn good job.

Don’t Use TTL. Set Your Flash to Manual Mode

The flash manufacturers won’t be thrilled to read this, but if I had to point to a feature on flash I feel makes photographers hate their flash, it’s TTL. This stands for “through-the-lens” metering, which was designed to have your flash make a smart decision about how bright to make the flash for the scene you’re shooting. Great idea, if only it worked. It’s biggest problem is that it’s so inconsistent. Sometimes it works, oftentimes it doesn’t, and when it does work, it’s way off. It looks okay one minute, but then you turn and shoot in a slightly different direction, and suddenly the flash that looked okay a minute ago is now way off. I think of it more as a flash manufacturer’s marketing tool than I do a photographer’s tool. It’s just too inconsistent. So, how do you get off this inconsistency merry-go-round? Skip the whole TTL tango and, instead, set your flash to Manual mode. Suddenly your whole flash world will make sense. Here’s how your flash shoot will go now: You take a shot. You look on the back

of your camera. If the flash is too bright, you lower the power of the flash and take another test shot. If it’s still too bright, you turn it down a little more, and so on, until it’s right on the money. If the flash isn’t bright enough, turn it up a bit. That’s it. Takes all of about 60 seconds. Try it once, and you’ll never use TTL again.

Get Your Flash Off-Camera

If you buy a dedicated flash, and you stick it on top of your camera, you’ll find that the light still looks incredibly bad—pretty much like the awful light from your pop-up flash, only brighter and more annoying. To make professionallooking portraits using flash, the very first step is to get that flash off the top of your camera. This is absolutely essential because once it’s off the top of your camera, you can position your flash where it creates nice, pleasing shadows, which add depth and dimension and create a much more flattering look for your subjects. I cannot overstate how key this is to getting great results. If you skip this step, you’ll never really fall in love with flash and that would be a shame because once you get flash down (and it’s easier than you’d think, as long as you don’t skip this all-important step), it will change the way you shoot (well, at least how you light) forever. There are only two really critical steps to getting great images with flash and this is one of them. So, you might as well

go ahead and place an order for a 6’ light stand with a flash mount tilt bracket, otherwise your flash will be just lying there on the floor, lighting your subject’s feet.

Don’t Use Your Pop-Up Flash as a Trigger

If your camera has a built-in pop-up flash, it usually can be configured so it doesn’t actually light your subject, but instead, sends out a dim pulse of light that gets picked up by your big off-camera flash, firing it wirelessly. That sounds great, and it would be if it worked consistently, but sadly, it does not. It works about as well as the motion-activated water faucets in airport restrooms, meaning it’s totally hit or miss. The problem is, for this pop-up flash trigger scheme to work, the dedicated flash you have set up off-camera has to be able to clearly “see” that pulse of light from your pop-up flash (that’s why this type of wireless flash triggering is called “line of sight”—if the off-camera flash can’t see the light from the pop-up flash, it won’t fire). This won’t be a problem until you really need it to fire, like when a paying client is standing there, and it just won’t fire. (I say this from experience.) That’s why there is a more preferred wireless method—one that is quite reliable and won’t let you down

(it’s on the next page).

HOW TO USE YOUR HOT SHOE FLASH’S MODELING LIGHT

Most hot shoe flashes don’t have a continuous modeling light, but can create a temporary one. For Canon flashes, turn it on by pressing-andholding the custom function setting button until its icon shows on the flash’s LCD. Then, turn the Select Dial and select the Modeling Flash (Fn 02) function. On a Nikon flash, press the Menu button, scroll down to Flash/Modeling, and press OK. Scroll to Modeling and press OK again. You fire it (sending a series of very fast flashes at your subject) by pressing the Test Firing button.

Use a “Real” Wireless Controller

If you want your flash to fire consistently (and believe me, you do), you can’t do that pop-up flash method mentioned on the previous page—you’re going to need real RF wireless. That usually means buying a flash that has real built-in wireless, and then buying a controller that lets you not only trigger the flash, not only turn the flash on/off, but one that also lets you change the power of your flash right from on top of your camera. What’s great about these is they’re not line of sight. These are real radio transmitters, so you can put them wherever you need them, even a few hundred feet away, and they’ll still fire every time. All the “big guys” (Canon, Nikon, Sony) make these, but you can also get inexpensive models from Yongnuo that work really well for a fraction of the cost of those big name brands. So, if you’re buying your first flash, remember that you need two things: (1) a flash that has built-in real RF (radio frequency) wireless and (2) a flash controller designed to work with that make

and model of flash (they are smaller and less expensive than the flash unit itself). This controller sits on top of your camera—just slide it right into the hot shoe mount up there—and now you can control your off-camera flash (the one sitting nearby on a light stand or being held by a friend or assistant) from right on top of your camera. Note: Make sure you get a controller for your flash, and not just a wireless trigger. A trigger will just fire your flash wirelessly. To change the power or turn it on/off, you’ll have to walk over to the controls on the back of the flash and do it there, which wastes time. You don’t want a wireless trigger. You want a wireless controller. Also, if you already own a Nikon, Canon, Phottix, Yongnuo, etc., flash with built-in wireless, you’ll have to buy the same brand’s wireless controller for it to actually control the flash. You can’t use a wireless Canon flash with a Yongnuo controller—the brands have to match.

How High to Set Your Flash Power

If you’re using your flash indoors, or outdoors in anything other than bright daylight, you’ll be running your flash 99% of the time at less than half power. In fact, you’ll often probably be running it at 1/4 power (I’m sometimes at 1/8 or 1/16 power during a typical shoot). Why so low? Because the idea is to balance the light from your flash with the existing light already in the room (or already available outside), so you usually want just a little bit of flash (or your flash will look like flash). The goal is to make your flash look like natural light, so your power setting will probably stay real darn low.

IF YOU’RE A PHOTOGRAPHY EDUCATOR, THIS IS FOR YOU

I know a lot of teachers have used this book in their classrooms (for which

I’m very grateful), and I have something else you might find really helpful, something I created for educators: it’s called “The Learning Light.” It’s a small, hand-held, battery-powered light with different types of lighting to help your students understand and practice using light, without having to deal with actual flashes or strobes. I think it’s something you’ll really find helpful in your classroom, so I hope you’ll give it a quick look. You can find more info about at the back of this book and at https://www.fjwestcott.com/learning-light-by-scott-kelby.

What Flash “Groups” and “Channels” Are For

Say you’ve set up three flashes—one is lighting your subject, the second is a hair light, and the third is lighting the background. If you increase the brightness, using your wireless controller (sitting on top of your camera), all three flashes will increase. You turn one up, they all go up. Turn one off, they all go off. If you wanted to control each one separately, you’d assign each to a different group. Most wireless controllers have three groups (some have four), usually named A, B, and C. I like to assign a flash to a group based on what it does. So, I always assign the main flash that lights my subject to Group A. If I add a second as a hair light behind them, that gets assigned to Group B. If I add one to light the background, that one’s in Group C (they’re all marked above). Why groups? That way, I always know which flash is which. You do this on the flash itself (it’s different on each flash brand, so check your manual). Once they’re assigned, control each one using your wireless controller. You’d

select a group (like Group B), and then if you turn the power up or down, it just affects the Group B flash. You can also turn the Group B flash on/off from there, as well. What’s nice is you can still turn them all up/down and on/off by choosing All, instead of A, B, or C. You can also assign more than one flash to a group. Say you have two flashes lighting your background. Just assign both to the same group, and now changing that group’s power affects both of your background flashes. That’s groups. So, what are channels for? Well, as long as you’re by yourself, you can pretty much ignore them. But, if you have a second (or third) photographer shooting with you, you don’t want their camera to fire your flash, right? You want everybody firing their own flash. So, you’d tell your second shooter, “I’m on Channel 1. You’ll need to switch to Channel 2.” Now, you’re both on separate channels, and nobody will be accidentally firing the other’s flash. There are usually up to 32 channels.

Use the Right Shutter Speed or You’ll Get This

When I’m shooting flash indoors, I have a shutter speed setting that I use that keeps me out of trouble. Spoiler alert: it’s 1/125 of a second. Why that shutter speed? Because it’s one that will absolutely keep my flash and my camera’s shutter in sync with each other and that keeps me out of trouble. What does “trouble” look like? Well, if I were to increase my shutter speed to say . . . I dunno . . . 1/400 of a second, or even higher, part of my picture would be covered with black (as seen above). That’s what happens when your flash and your shutter get out of sync. So, how do I avoid that from ever happening? You already know the answer—shoot with your shutter speed at 1/125 of a second. Most of the time, I can set that as my shutter speed and never touch it again. The times I would change it are covered on pages 123 and 126, where I talk about changing the brightness of your background when you’re shooting on location. Outside of that, I’m a “1/125 of a second guy.” That sounds bad, but

you know what I mean.

I Start with This F-Stop

My go-to starting f-stop when I’m using flash is f/5.6. When you’re using flash, this gives you the opportunity to have the background a little soft, and it works beautifully as part of the camera settings recipe that works so well anytime you’re using flash indoors.

Set Your ISO to Its Cleanest Setting

Your subject is going to be lit with the bright light from your flash, and that flash is going to pretty much freeze their motion, and that stopping power lets us shoot, most of the time, at our lowest, cleanest ISO, which for most cameras is 100 ISO (but depending on your make and model, it could be as low as 50, so check your manual). So, if you were worrying about what to set your ISO at . . . well . . . now ya know. Here are my go-to camera settings when I’m using flash indoors: f-stop: f/5.6 Shutter speed: 1/125 of a second ISO: 100 With those settings, I turn on my flash at a power setting of 1/4 power, and I usually don’t have to touch my camera settings again. The only thing I do is

adjust the power of the flash up or down. If I take a shot, and then look at the image on the back of my camera, and the flash looks too bright, I turn the power down a bit and take another test shot to see how it looks. Even starting at 1/4 power, I often have to turn the power of the flash down to around 1/8 power, so it doesn’t look too “flashy.” My settings are pretty close to this for shooting outdoors with flash, but there is one part that changes (see page 127).

Make Your Light Soft and Beautiful

Remember that I said earlier there were two critical things to making beautiful portraits with flash? One of them was to get your flash off the top of your camera, so you can create depth and dimension by adding directional shadows. (Well, I said that, but with less fancy words.) This is the other one: make the light from your flash soft and beautiful. If you don’t do something to make it soft and beautiful, your lighting will be the opposite—hard with harsh shadows. Take a look at the two images above. The one on the left was shot without doing anything to make the light soft and beautiful—it’s just bare flash. The one on the right is using a small softbox, but what a world of difference it makes. These were both taken with the same camera, same lens, etc., and taken literally just seconds apart. The only thing that changed was that I put the flash into a softbox. It’s one of those “must-do” things.

The Softbox I Use to Make the Light Soft

You could use an umbrella to soften your flash, but those are pretty “old school,” so most folks prefer to use a softbox. Because your flash is inside a box, it helps direct the light and keeps it from spreading everywhere, like the “light grenade” that is an umbrella. The particular softbox I dearly love (and pretty much use exclusively for flash) is FJ Westcott’s Rapid Box 26" Octa softbox. It’s small, very lightweight, sets up in no time, has a diffuser that goes over the front of the softbox itself, comes with a tilt mounting bracket to hold both the softbox and your flash (so you can put it on top of a light stand), and it all fits in a very small carrying case. Most importantly, it makes your light soft and beautiful, which is absolutely critical. It costs around $150—that ain’t bad.

Where to Place Your Flash for the Best Results

This is easier than you’d think because there’s a particular position where you can put your light that makes people look great. It creates a light pattern on their face that is particularly flattering, and it’s why most photographers put their light in the same spot. So, where is this magical spot? (Remember, you’re using flash to replicate the light from the sun. Where’s the sun? It’s up in the sky, aiming down on us, right? Do the same thing with your flash.) Position your flash at a 45° angle to where your subject is standing, up about a foot or so higher than their head, and tilt your softbox down at them. This position creates really nice, flattering shadows on your subject’s face, and when you use a softbox to make the light soft and beautiful, by doing these two things, you’re really stacking the deck in your favor.

MOUNTING FLASHES ANYWHERE

If you’re going to wind up attaching your flash to something, pick up a Manfrotto 175F Justin Spring Clamp with Flash Shoe (better known as simply a “Justin clamp”). With it, your flash slides into a little plastic hot shoe on the top of the clamp, which is connected to a miniature ballhead that lets you position your flash in any direction at any angle. It also has a large clamp on one end, so you can clamp it onto just about anything. These sell for around $57, and once you use it, you’ll never go anywhere without it.

Get Even Softer Light

Once your flash is off-camera on a light stand, and you’ve got a softbox in front of your flash (your flash rig), here’s how to make your already soft light (thanks to the softbox) even softer: move your flash rig closer to your subject. The closer you move your flash/softbox to your subject, the softer the light. It’s as simple as that. In the shot above, you can see that my softbox is so close that it’s almost in the shot—when I want really soft light, I get as close as I can, without actually seeing the edge of the softbox in my frame. Now, as you move it closer to your subject, of course, it’s going to get brighter (just like it would if you walked toward somebody holding a flashlight—the closer you got to them, the brighter it would get). So, if you started with your flash at 1/4 power, but then you moved it a lot closer to your subject, you’d need to turn the power of your flash down a bit. The closer you move it toward them, the more you’ll need to turn it down. Remember: Do a test shot and see how the brightness of

the flash looks. If it’s too bright, turn it down. One more thing (and this might sound really obvious, but . . .): if you want to make your light harder and edgier (maybe you’re doing a portrait of an athlete), move your flash rig farther away from your subject. The farther away the light is from your subject, the harder and edgier it will be.

Super-Cheap Way to Make Beautiful Light

One inexpensive, easy way to spread and soften the light from your flash is to shoot it through a large diffuser. These diffusers are made of white translucent stretched fabric (usually round, like the one you see above, or square with rounded corners), and they spread and diffuse the light from your flash, making it soft and beautiful. Since they’re just fabric, they’re super-lightweight —they’re designed to collapse down into a very small, flat size, so they’re easy to take with you (they come with a small, flat carrying pouch)—and best of all, they’re a bargain! You can get a Westcott 30" 5-in-1 Reflector (the same one I use), which includes a 30" diffuser, for around $40 (plus, now you have a great reflector, as well. Actually, you’ll have four reflectors, just like the ones we talked about in Chapter 5). To use this diffuser, have a friend (or assistant) hold the panel as close to your subject as possible without it being seen in the photo, and about a foot or more in front of your flash. That way, when the tiny

light from the flash hits the panel, it causes the light to spread out dramatically, which gives you much softer, smoother, more flattering light. (Just know that the farther away you move the flash, the lower the power of the light will become, so if you move the flash far away, you’ll have to increase its power.) If you don’t have an assistant or a friend that can help, you can clamp your diffuser on a second light stand using a Manfrotto 275 Mini Clip Clamp for around $15.

You Might Have to “Bounce It”

If you’re someplace where you can’t use a diffuser or a softbox, but still want nice, soft light, try bouncing it off the ceiling. When the light hits the ceiling, it spreads big time, which softens it, so when it comes back down on your subject, it’s softer and nicer. It’s not as good or directional as using a softbox, so you’ll only do this when you can’t use one. Just tilt your flash head up toward the ceiling, and it bounces and reflects back down onto your subject. Because the light is coming from above, the shadows appear on the floor behind your subject, instead of on the wall behind them, which is a plus. Because the light is softer, the shadows are softer, too. So, why don’t we use this technique all the time? Well, (1) there’s not always a ceiling to bounce off (sometimes you’re outdoors), or (2) it’s too high (if it’s much higher than 10 feet, the light has too far to travel, so your subject doesn’t get properly lit. But, even if it’s low enough, you lose power going all the way up and back down).

There’s also (3) the fact that light picks up the color of what it hits. So, if the ceiling is blue, the light comes back down with a blue tint, and your subject will look smurfarific! Finally, (4) that bounced light is kinda flat and not nearly as directional as we’d like for creating those beautiful shadows, but again, it’s still way better than harsh, direct flash, so keep this bounce technique in your back pocket in case you need it.

IF YOU HAVE TO STAND BACK PRETTY FAR, DO THIS

If you need to stand back more than 10 feet from your subject, you can extend the power and range of your flash by raising your camera’s ISO setting (making it more sensitive to light). So, if you raise it from 100 to 200 ISO, you effectively double the power (and range) of your flash.

Why We Add Gel with Flash Outdoors

The light from your flash is always the same color—bright white. That’s fine when you’re shooting indoors because we’re used to seeing white light indoors, but when you go outdoors, white light looks kinda weird because we know the sun doesn’t make white light (well, unless you’re really close to the sun, in a space suit, sitting in a Tesla roadster). When we think sun, we think yellow or orange, so white light looks weird to us. That’s why, when we shoot outside, we put a thin, orange gel over our flash head, so it doesn’t look so white. Look at the images above. The one on the left is the regular white light from my flash, and the one on the right has a single piece of orange gel taped over the front it. Look at how much more natural the shot on the right looks. The later in the day it gets, the more orange gel we put on. Around sunset, we need the light from our flash to look like the light from the setting sun, so we put a heavy orange gel over the light (literally just tape these over the front of the flash head). If

you don’t have an orange gel, you can buy big 20x24" sheets from B&H Photo for around $7. I use Rosco’s Cinegel Filter #3409 RoscoSun 1/4 CTO. It’s really thin, so I cut them out, so they’re a little wider than the size of my flash head, and then I tape one over the front of my flash (using gaffer’s tape) anytime I’m shooting outdoors. As it gets later in the day, if I see the light from my flash starting to look white, I tape another one over the first one to double up. I might have to add another one or two as it gets really close to sunset or after. Does it really make that big a difference? Yes. It. Does. By the way: some flashes come with a set of pre-cut gels (including an orange gel) that slide right onto the flash to let you change the color of its light. The other colored gels are to balance the color of your flash to match the existing light. For example, if you’re shooting in an office with fluorescent lights, to match the existing light, you’d put the green gel over your flash.

When to Add a Second Flash (and Why)

There are two big reasons we might add a second flash: (1) We want to light our background, giving some visual separation from our subject and the background, or just to make it brighter, so our subject stands out from a dark background. Or, (2) you want to light your subject’s hair from behind or from one side (which is what I generally do, and what I did above), which also provides some separation from the background, as well as just making the lighting more interesting. Luckily, adding a second flash is easy—you just turn it on and it will fire when your other flash fires (well, as long as it’s the same flash brand, and both flashes are set to the same channel. Make sure they’re both set to Channel 1 [you do this on the flash itself], and they’ll both fire when you press your shutter. When you buy a new flash, they’re set to Channel 1 by default, so you’re probably okay, but if it’s not, you can just change it. We looked at channels more back on page 111).

THE PAID-GIG FLASH INSURANCE POLICY

If you’re hired to do a paid gig, you want to make darn sure you have a backup flash, because if, for whatever reason, your first flash dies, at least you can grab the backup. You also want to make sure the flash you use as a backup is the same make and model as your main flash. That way, if you suddenly have to switch flashes in the middle of the shoot, you’re not trying to figure out how it works, or what the settings should be, or anything else that might freak you out because you’re not used to working with that model of flash.

Brighten the Background Behind Your Subject

If you’re shooting indoors, and you want the light to look really natural, it’s important to balance the light from your flash with the available light already in the room. That way, the background behind your subject doesn’t go “dark,” like you see so often in camera phone shots taken with flash. The technique we use to control the light behind our subject is to slow down our shutter speed, which lets more of the available light in the room into our photo. We call this “dragging the shutter,” and it works wonders in helping you balance the room light with the light from your flash, so the shot looks more natural. As I mentioned earlier, my usual shutter speed when using flash is 1/125 of a second, so to see more of the room light, I would try lowering the shutter speed to 1/60 or to 1/30 of a second or even 1/15 of a second to see if that brightens the background behind my subject enough. You don’t have to worry much about your subject moving a bit and getting a shot where they are blurred, as

the flash duration is so quick it will generally freeze your subject. Remember your goal is balancing the light from the flash with the room light, so the overall shot looks natural.

Rear Sync Rocks (& Why You Should Use It)

There’s a setting on your camera that will not only help you get better-quality photos with flash, your flash shots will get so much better that you’ll wonder why this feature isn’t turned on by default (but it’s not—you’ll have to go and turn it on yourself). It’s called Rear Sync. What it basically does is changes when the flash actually fires. Usually, your flash fires the moment you press the shutter button, right? So it freezes any action in the scene, but it also generally makes everything solid black behind your subject (like you see in most snapshots). Changing to Rear Sync makes the flash fire at the end of the exposure (rather than the beginning), which lets the camera expose for the natural background light in the room first, and then at the very last second, it fires the flash to freeze your subject. Now your background isn’t black— instead, it has color, depth, and detail (as seen above right), and this gives you a much more professional look all the way around. Give it a try and you’ll see

what I mean (just remember to keep the camera still when shooting in Rear Sync mode, because the shutter stays open longer—enough to expose for the background [see previous page]. This can create some cool effects if your subject is moving while your shutter is open, or it can create some irritating effects if they’re moving and you don’t want them to).

The Advantages of Using Flash in Daylight

A lot of photographers ask, “Why would I need to use a flash outdoors during the day?” The simple answer is that it usually looks better. By using flash outside, you get to create directional light. You get to use a softbox, so the light that hits your subject is soft and beautiful. If you position the sun behind your subject, you get to use the sun as your second light—it lights their hair from behind, creating a rim light, and this helps give you separation from the background, too. In short, getting soft, directional light outside just looks better.

The Instant Black Background

We’re out on a downtown street and we set up my flash with a softbox. The settings for this particular outdoor shoot are very different than usual because we’re trying to do something different: make a regular daylight background turn solid black. I’m shooting my 70–200mm f/2.8 lens (that part is pretty much the same as always), but my f-stop is set to f/22. My ISO is set to 100 and my shutter speed is 1/250 of a second. The name and idea for this technique comes from my buddy, UK-based photographer and trainer Glyn Dewis. The idea is to set your camera such that so little light comes into it that when you take a shot, all you get is a solid black image. Then, when you turn on your flash at full power, the only thing you’ll see in your image is whatever is lit with the light from that full-power flash—that’s all that lights your subject. There are three things we can do to limit the light that reaches our sensor: (1) Raise the f-stop. In my case, my lens only goes to f/22, but some go to f/32. The

higher the number, the darker your scene will be. (2) Lower your ISO to its lowest setting. The lower the number, the less your camera is sensitive to light. (3) Raise your shutter speed to 1/250 of a second (that’s the highest normal sync speed for most hot shoe flashes, but at that speed it lets in the least amount of existing light). Now, you may not need to do all three to create a solid black image, but you’ll know it’s right when you take a photo and there’s no image, just solid black. That’s your cue to turn your flash on at full power. Thanks to Glyn for this awesome technique. I finished it off with just standard portrait retouching stuff (removed blemishes, brightened the eyes, etc.) and some sharpening with Photoshop’s Unsharp Mask filter (Amount: 120%, Radius: 1, Threshold: 3).

Shooting Sunset Portraits with Flash

First, turn off your flash, and then position your subject so the sun is behind them. So far, so good. Now let’s get some starting place camera settings. Switch your camera to manual mode, so you can dial in these camera settings: Set your shutter speed to 1/125 of a second (see page 112 for why) and set your ISO at 100. Those two settings aren’t going to change. Now, set your fstop to f/5.6, but just as a starting place. Look through your camera’s viewfinder, and you’ll see a meter (like the one you see in the inset above. Depending on your camera’s make and model, it might be along the bottom of your viewfinder or along the right side). When the meter is right in the center, you have a proper exposure for the scene you’re in front of, if you didn’t own a flash. Now, moving only your f-stop (and no other settings), get that meter right in the middle—at the proper exposure. For example, let’s say you’re at f/8. Your job now is to intentionally make the scene darker than it should be. In

fact, you’re going to darken it until your subject looks like a silhouette with the sun setting behind them. You might have to go two or more stops darker, so if the proper exposure is at f/8, increase your f-stop to f/16 and see if your subject is looking pretty much like a silhouette. That’s all the hard stuff. Now, just turn your flash on, set your power setting to 1/4 power, make sure you have a gel on your flash (see page 121), and you’re ready to rock that shoot!

SHUTTER SPEED: 1/320 sec | F-STOP: F/2.8 | ISO: 800 | FOCAL LENGTH: 200mm

Chapter Seven

Shooting Weddings Like a Pro How to Get Professional Results from Your Next Shoot If you’re a professional wedding photographer, you’re probably not going to read a chapter about how to shoot like a professional wedding photographer. In fact, you’re probably not even going to read this chapter intro because you’re saying to yourself: “I don’t need to read that chapter intro. I’m already a professional wedding photographer.” So, since we know that these people are not going to read this, we can talk about them behind their backs and they’ll never know. This is what pro photography is really all about—making fun of others. Now, let’s step away from making fun, and step into something that is probably the best wedding photography advice you’ll ever get. It’s something professional photographers already know (they learned it the hard way), but I’m going to share it with you now even though you haven’t “paid your dues.” Some wedding pros would curse me for sharing this trick of the trade with you because they don’t think “you’ve earned it.” But, I think, after what we’ve been through, that if I can share this one thing with you, it will make a big difference in shooting all the weddings you’ll wind up shooting simply because you own a nice camera and your friends are cheap. This tip is deceivingly simple, but so true to the core. The tip is this: nobody cares about the groom, so basically just focus on the bride. Sure, you need to take two, maybe three shots of the groom when he’s not with the bride, but outside of that, nah. Really? Nobody cares about the groom? His mom, maybe. His dad? His dad never loved him, so we’re back to the mom. Look, a wedding day isn’t about the groom. Sure, he’s somewhat necessary, but only as a prop for the bride. You’re not going to make a beautiful shot of the groom. You’re not going to enter a shot of the groom in a wedding photography contest, and you’re not going to get an order for a shot of just the groom. Any time you’re shooting the groom, you’re not shooting the bride or the bridesmaids (the runners-up for what you should shoot), so stick with the bride. Now, when you meet a pro

wedding photographer, simply nod and casually mention, “It’s all about the bride, am I right?” and just like that, you’re in “the club.” Now you know.

Create a Shot List

Before you even leave to head to the wedding, you should put together a shot list of photos you’ll need to take for the wedding album, prints, etc. There are no redos at weddings, so you’d better be sure you leave with a list in hand of which shots you need, from bride and groom formals, to detail shots (the invitations, the rings, the bouquet, the bride’s shoes, etc.), to reception shots, like cutting the cake, receiving lines, place cards, and more. Without a written shot list, you’re winging it, and it’s almost an absolute lock that you’ll miss one or more critical shots that your clients (the bride and groom) are going to expect to be in their album. So, don’t take a chance—this little bit of preparation can make a world of difference. Luckily, you can find wedding photography shot lists to download online for free (just Google “wedding shot list”). Find a list that makes sense to you, and although you can get creative and do far beyond what it suggests, at least you’ll have the most critical shots

covered. Also, make sure you talk to the bride and groom before you finalize your shot list to ensure the specific shots they want are included (they may want shots with old high school or college friends, or a special relative, and the only way to find out about these is to talk with the bride and groom in advance).

HAVE BACKUPS FOR EVERYTHING!

Always take backups for everything. At the very minimum, you need to have two camera bodies, backup batteries for your flash, a backup flash unit, extra memory cards, a backup lens, and lots of backup batteries for both cameras.

Shooting in Low-Light Situations (Like a Church)

Not every wedding is held in a church these days, and you might wind up shooting anywhere from a beach to a barn. But, since so many weddings are still held in churches, you need to get really good at shooting in low light because you can’t tell the bride and groom, “I’m not sure what happened, but most of the photos are blurry.” Besides getting good at holding your camera still while shooting (and using tricks like leaning up against a wall to help stabilize you and your camera, or leaning on a pew to help steady your arms), I recommend using Auto ISO (see page 12) to make sure your shutter speed doesn’t drop too low during the ceremony, so at least you’ll know your shots will be sharp. Don’t worry about Auto ISO increasing the amount of noise—only photographers care about noise. So, unless you’re shooting a photographer’s wedding, you’re probably pretty safe with some noise (plus, you and the bride and groom would rather have some noise than blurry pictures). Next, use the lowest available f-stop to help let more light in (more on this on the next page), and if you have the option of using a lens or camera body with image

stabilization, that will help keep things steady while you shoot. Lens stabilization is so good these days it can really make a difference.

SILENCE YOUR CAMERA’S BEEP

The last thing the couple (or clergy, or guests) wants to hear during the ceremony is the distracting sound of your camera beeping as it locks focus. So, before the wedding begins, go to your camera’s menu and disable the audible beep sound.

Another Big Helper When Low-Light Shooting

Because using a flash during a ceremony held in a church is usually a big nono, another trick wedding pros use to shoot in low-light situations is to shoot with a really fast lens (by fast, I mean a lens that can shoot at f-stops as low as f/2.8 or f/1.8 or even lower). Fast lenses like these let in more light, so they’re ideal for shooting in low-light situations like you might find in a church. Since they let in more light, you don’t have to raise your ISO as much (or maybe even at all, depending on how bright it is in the church). This is why if you look in a pro wedding shooter’s camera bag, you’ll find at least one really fast lens, but probably more.

SCOPE OUT THE VENUE BEFORE THE WEDDING DAY

Want to take your stress down a big notch? Make a quick trip to the wedding venue a few days before the wedding (around the same time of day as the wedding, if possible) to check the place out for yourself (and no, looking at pictures on their website is not “just as good”). That way, you won’t be met with any venue surprises on the day of the wedding. Look for shooting angles, where the great light is, where to stage from, what extra gear you might need (and what you can leave at home), and so on. This helps you work out any logistical challenges beforehand, while things are calm and the clock’s not ticking.

Three Lenses I Take When Shooting Weddings

I know I won’t have time for changing lenses, especially once the ceremony starts, so I only take three lenses for a wedding shoot, and each one covers a particular task. I take a 16–35mm for epic wide shots of the church or the venue, and sometimes even of the empty reception hall when everything is set, but nobody’s there yet, so it’s a clean, empty look with everything in place. I take a 70–200mm f/2.8 as my main lens for capturing pretty much everything, from the formals, to the individual bridal portraits, to the ceremony itself. If I had to take just one lens, this is it. I take an 85mm f/1.8 for close-up detail shots (like of the bouquet, invitation, place cards, etc.). I also wind up using the 85mm f/1.8 for portraits outside, so I can throw the background way out of focus behind my subject (I’ll be shooting at f/1.8 the whole time outdoors, but probably indoors, too). While my go-to lens is the 70–200mm, I know a number of wedding pros who choose the 85mm as their “bread and butter”

lens for weddings, so you can’t go wrong either way. But, during the ceremony, I think it’s hard to get close enough sometimes if all you have is an 85mm.

DON’T CHANGE LENSES, CHANGE CAMERAS

Things happen very quickly at weddings. So, if you’re shooting with a zoom lens, and you suddenly need to switch to a wide-angle, don’t switch lenses, switch camera bodies. Keep two camera bodies around your neck (or one in your hand), and put a wide-angle lens on one and a zoom lens on the other. That way, switching lenses takes two seconds, not two minutes, and now you “get the shot.”

Backlighting Your Bride

A popular effect with wedding photographers is to backlight the bride for their formal bridal portraits—where a bright light rims the outline of her—and then add in just a little bit of flash to light the front of her, so she’s not a silhouette (as shown above). This takes two flash units: one in front of the bride (in this case, I used an off-camera flash on a light stand, positioned to the left of the camera at a 45° angle), and a second flash on a light stand behind her (here, it was behind and to the right of her, just out of the frame). The flash of light from the front flash triggers the second flash behind the bride. The key is to make sure the flash behind the bride is much brighter than the flash in front of her (in the shot above, I lowered the power of the front flash as low as I could, but kept it bright enough so it would still trigger the flash behind her. It took a couple of test flashes to find out just how low that front flash could go). Another nice look (which is very dramatic) is to go ahead and let her just be lit

with a flash behind her, then turn the flash in front off, so she actually is mostly a silhouette.

COMPOSE TO INCLUDE THE CHURCH

A trick I learned from master wedding photographer David Ziser: compose a decent number of the formal bride and groom portraits to include the interior of the church. It’s important to brides to see the church where the ceremony took place, and by composing it into the formals, it really gives the shots a sense of place.

Finding Beautiful Light for the Bride

You’ve arrived at the church or hall with a flash or two, a softbox, and all your lighting accessories (and you should have all that), but before you set up, look around to see if you can find some beautiful natural light. In many churches, the diffused light from a stained glass window can be gorgeous, or even a high window in a hall—it’s worth searching out (look at the wonderful soft shadows above on the side of her face furthest from the window). Ideally, of course, look for a window without direct sunlight (a window facing north provides soft, diffused light any time of day). Position your bride to the side of the light (like you see here; the window is on the left. It was a stained glass window and there wasn’t a ton of light coming in, so I had her turn her head toward it and look up a bit, so more light would hit her face). If you find a great natural light spot like this, use it for some pre-wedding shots of the bride alone, with her mother, and/or just with her father. Note: The bride is sitting here, so I’m

shooting on my knees, quite a ways back, using a 70–200mm lens.

TIPS FOR POSING THE BRIDE

More tips from David Ziser: Have the bride stand with her feet in a staggered V-shape, then shift her weight to her back foot, and lower her shoulder farthest from your light source. This creates a flattering diagonal line between her shoulders and creates a much more dynamic look for your pose. To keep detail in the bridal gown, you want your flash to cross the dress, not hit it straight on. Simply position the bride so her shoulder that is closest to the light source is angled toward the light source.

Formals: Where to Aim

©ADOBE STOCK/SHUNEVICH24

When shooting large groups for the formal portraits, you’ll generally want to make sure that you use an aperture setting that keeps everyone in focus, so try f/11 for a good depth of field for groups. Now, where do you focus? If you have more than one row of people deep or their positions are staggered (like they are here, where everybody’s not on the same plane), the old rule (which still stands true today) is to focus on the eyes of someone right up in the front row. In this case, I’d go with focusing on the eyes of one of the two guys in front on either side of the bride. You have more depth behind than in front, so make sure you focus on them, and the rest should be okay. But, if that front row is a little out of focus, the whole shot is a bust, so make sure you get that front row right on the money.

DON’T SPEND TOO MUCH TIME ON THE FORMALS

A very famous wedding photographer gave me some great advice about shooting the formals (the posed group portraits). He said, “Get the formals over fast. You have to do them, but nobody cares about them.” They don’t usually include a special or touching moment and they’re rarely photos anybody talks about after the wedding (unless, of course, you forget to do them). So, get everybody together, knock those shots out, and move on to the important job of capturing the moments that do matter.

Formals: Don’t Cut Off Joints

When you’re framing your formals in your viewfinder, for a more professional look, be careful not to cut off anyone at the joints (in other words, don’t let the bottom of the frame cut anyone off at the elbow or knee. On the side of the frame, don’t cut anyone off at the wrist or elbow either). Basically, stay away from the joints. If you have to crop an arm or leg off, try to do it as close to the middle of the arm or leg as possible, staying clear of the joints. ’Nuf said.

SOME TIPS FOR FORMALS

Build off the bride and groom: A popular format for creating all your formals—have them in the center and have them stay put. They don’t move. Instead, have groups of other people (bridesmaids, groomsmen, the

best man, etc.) move in and out around them. Use them as building blocks to make group shots easier. Another tip: Your main job is to follow the bride. Make sure your main focus at the pre-wedding, the ceremony, the formals, and the reception is the bride. Follow her just like you would follow the quarterback if you were shooting a football game. Especially if you’re going to be selling these photos, as it will be the bride (either directly or indirectly) who will be buying the prints. So, make darn sure that she’s the clear star of the show.

Formals: How High to Position Your Camera

When you’re shooting your formal shots, the height that you position your camera is actually very important because if it’s not positioned correctly, your subject’s body can look distorted or some parts can look larger than normal (in general, this is not a good thing). So, finding the right height for bridal portraits is critical. Here are a few guidelines to help you get the pro look: Standing, Full-Length Portraits: Position your camera (on your tripod) at the bride’s waist height (yes, you’ll have to squat down/bend over, etc., but the final result will be worth it). Keep your lens straight (don’t aim up toward the bride’s face). 3/4 Shots (from the Calf Up): Position your camera (on your tripod) at the bride’s chest level and shoot with your lens straight from there.

Head-and-Shoulders Shots: Position your camera (on your tripod) either at the bride’s eye level or slightly above.

BACKGROUND TIP

Vary your background for your formals. It may not seem like a big deal at the time, but when you see the same background over and over and over again in the final wedding album, it can become really tedious. Once you’ve shot a few sets on one background, if there’s another simple background nearby, try it in order to keep the album from looking like a cookie cutter.

Change Your Vantage Point to Add Interest

Want to create a shot everyone will remember? Shoot it from a high vantage point (look for a second story window you can shoot down from, or a balcony on the second floor, or a bridge, etc.). If you can’t find an existing high vantage point, then you can always create your own by bringing (or borrowing) a ladder to shoot from (like the Conair Travel Smart LadderKart, which doubles as a hand truck to help you move your gear when you’re not standing on it. It holds up to 250 lbs., and sells for around $77, but I’ve found other similar ladders online, as well). Of course, be careful, because being on a ladder with expensive camera equipment is the stuff Hollywood comedies tragedies are made of. This high vantage point trick is ideal for shooting bridesmaids, groomsmen, the bride and groom, and even the bride alone (as shown here, where I shot the bride while standing on a ladder).

PUT YOUR SHUTTER INTO QUIET OR SILENT MODE

If you’re shooting a mirrorless camera, you’ve got the advantage of being able to disable the shutter sound on your camera altogether, and I highly recommend it. The shutter sound draws attention, and it’s distracting during the ceremony. Plus, the added bonus is that you can use that silence to capture some touching personal moments because the shutter sound signals “there’s a photographer shooting us, act differently.” Some DLSRs also have a quiet mode, and while it’s not silent, it definitely makes the shutter sound much less noticeable.

Shooting the Details: Which Ones to Shoot

The photojournalism style of wedding photography has been very popular for years now (it’s where you photographically tell the story of the wedding, as though you were covering it for a newspaper or magazine). One of the cornerstone elements of this technique is to make sure to capture the tiny details of the wedding, especially behind the scenes before the wedding. Here’s a list of things you might want to include, which can either stand alone in the wedding album or be used as backgrounds for other photos: The bride’s shoes The bride’s dress hanging on a hanger Any fine detail in her dress The bride’s tiara, necklace, etc.

The wedding invitation The sheet music played at the wedding The guest book (once a few people have signed it) Their champagne glasses Name cards at the reception Their wedding rings (perhaps posed on the invitation with some rose petals casually placed nearby) The airline tickets for their honeymoon The groom’s cuff links The bottle of perfume that the bride wore The bride’s bouquet

Try an “Unplugged” Wedding

©ADOBE STOCK/HALFPOINT

At a wedding today, with 80 people, you’ll have about 82 photographers (all 80 guests with their cellphone cameras, you, and your second shooter). I’m constantly surprised at how bold and obtrusive guests can be these days— stepping right in front of you (the photographer hired to capture the day), stepping into the aisle as the bride is coming down—how many of them will physically nudge you out of the way, if it’s a shot they really want, and how often they will ruin what would have been a great image. It’s like, instead of wedding guests, they’re tourists on vacation. That’s why I try to convince the bride and groom to consider an “unplugged” wedding where the only people photographing during the ceremony itself are the paid photographers. I give them an email to send out to their guests, letting them know that they have hired a team of professionals to cover their wedding from every angle, that

there’s a video team there too, and that they ask that instead of viewing the wedding through their phone, that they just be present and enjoy the couple’s special day—unplugged and free from taking photos during the ceremony. At the reception, “all bets are off” and they can shoot to their heart’s content, but during the ceremony, they ask that guests please put away their phones. Certainly, not every bride and groom are going to go for this, but the ones I’ve pitched it to think it sounds awesome (I’ve yet to have one say, “No, we need a bunch of crappy phone pics”). Once you’ve shot an “unplugged” wedding, you will love it on a level you cannot imagine, and you (and the bride and groom) will see that in the results from the beautiful images you make. I encourage you to at least pitch it to them—all they can say is no, but I think there’s a 65/35 chance in your favor they go for it.

The Mini Macro Lens Perfect for Detail Shots

This is the only Canon product I know of that also works for Sony, Nikon, Olympus, and Fuji shooters. It’s a screw-on macro filter (it’s not really a lens— it screws onto your existing lens like a filter) that lets your current lens take awesome close-up macro shots, without taking up the room (and weight) or cost of using a dedicated macro lens. It’s called the Close-Up Lens, and you buy it based on the width (roundness) of the lens you’ll be using it with. The filter is not even an inch thick, it’s fairly lightweight, and best of all, it’s really priced right. They start at around $75 for the 52mm and go up as you get to larger sizes (the one for my 70–200mm, which is rather large at 77mm, runs $149, but is still a bargain compared to buying and carrying a big macro lens). I use this for close-up shots of the rings, the invitation, the back of the bride’s shoes, the groom’s cuff links, the invitation—all the stuff that looks great with a super-shallow depth of field. Just remember: when you use this lens you

really need to be on a tripod (even in daylight), and you need to use an f-stop that will keep as much in focus as possible, so either f/16 or even f/22 (a popular f-stop for macro shots). Now, just toss that filter in your bag (it comes in a clear plastic case), and you’ll have it handy when you need it.

BACK UP YOUR PHOTOS ON-SITE

A wedding happens once. You don’t get a redo. So, make sure backing up your photos on location is part of your workflow. If you fill a memory card, and pop in a new one, the next thing you should be doing is backing up that full card to a portable hard drive.

Using Flash at the Reception

Shooting at the reception is one of the few times (maybe the only time, now that I think of it) that I’ll put a flash directly on top of my camera. You’ll be happy to know that I don’t aim it directly at my subject; I’m either going to aim it up at an angle, so the light from the flash bounces off the ceiling (if the ceiling’s low enough and is either white or a light color) and falls down on my subjects wider and softer. Or, more likely (especially if the ceiling is too high to bounce off of), I’ll aim it straight up, so just a bit of the light from the flash goes forward to my subjects. This works way better than you’d think and just gives enough illumination to light my subjects without making it look too “flashy.” In the shot you see above, some of the light from the flash goes forward to light the bride and her father, but still blends in with the existing room light without overpowering it. Notice how you can still see a magenta light on the bride’s dress, along her arm, and on her dad’s head? Since the

flash is aiming straight up and not at them, I used an 85mm lens, so I could shoot at that fast aperture, and it’s wide enough to let me include some of the room. Using such a low f-stop also puts the background a bit out of focus, separating them from it. Another popular technique is to take one or, ideally, two flashes, put each on a light stand, and position them in opposite corners of the room. Raise the light stand up, with the flash up high near the ceiling, so it hits it and spreads out over the room, then set the power at 100% on each flash. When you take your shot, your wireless trigger (see page 109) will fire both of those flashes in the corners and will add some light to the room from above, without making it look flashy and overpowering the existing reception lighting. It works wonders.

Go Super-Wide for a More Epic Feel

To create a “hero shot” (that killer shot you’ll put as a full page, or even a twopage spread, in the album), I go for a super-wide-angle lens (like a 16mm for full-frame or a 10mm or 12mm on a crop-sensor body), and I either get up high (like I did here) or down really low (maybe on a Platypod; see page 79). Combining that wide-angle with either a high or low perspective really gives the shot an epic look, as super-wides visually move what you’re standing in front of farther away. So, a small church can look like a cathedral, and a small winding staircase can look like you shot in the Palace of Versailles. Here, I’m positioned up high, shooting down, so I could see the bride and the elegant-looking columns behind her. The key to using a lens like this is to keep your subject from getting too close to the sides of the image because it will normally distort and stretch them, so they look much wider. To make it look even bigger and more epic, I climbed up two steps on a LadderKart (see page 139), so I could

include the railing on the right and create more depth. When you want things to look big and epic, a super-wide-angle lens and a high or low perspective is just the ticket.

IF YOU CAN’T AFFORD A REALLY FAST LENS, GET THIS!

Most fast lenses are quite expensive, so if you need a sharp, very fast, budget lens, try a 50mm f/1.8. They’re around $125 (a bit more for Sony) and are great in low light. One caveat: don’t use them for close-up portraits. The distortion of a 50mm is not flattering for brides up close (or anyone for matter). Use this for full-length shots, the bride coming down the aisle, ceremony shots—stuff where you can shoot farther back.

Why You Might Want a Second Shooter

©ADOBE STOCK/VOLODYMYR

If there’s one thing pro wedding shooters know, it’s that you always need to have a second shooter with you, taking shots during the entire event as part of your wedding coverage team. Think of this second photographer as an insurance policy to make sure all the most important shots are covered—the bigger the wedding, the more you need one or even two (I’ve used as many as three). You can’t be everywhere, and if anything goes wrong, there’s another photographer to keep shooting if you have to stop to deal with something, or they can deal with the issue while you keep shooting. This second shooter will also bring a different style, dimension, and composition to the day. They can be shooting from a different location in the church, with a different angle and vantage point. Plus, there’s also a good chance that if you missed an important shot, they’ll have gotten it (or vice versa). Second shooters (who usually get a

flat day rate) are worth their weight in gold. Once you have one, you’ll see how much easier and more efficient they make the experience.

YOU NEED A SINGLE POINT OF CONTACT ON WEDDING DAY

To keep from pulling your hair out, and/or from getting into awkward situations, before the wedding, have the bride and groom nominate someone. That way, you won’t have a mother-in-law pulling you off to shoot what she thinks needs shooting, while Aunt Millie is telling you to shoot her grandson because he’s doing something cute. You can have halfa-dozen family members pulling you in different directions, so you need one official person you can go to for help (including rounding up the family for formals), direction, and to run interference, or you’ll be out there in a Wild West kind of situation.

Dramatic Bridal Portrait #1

This is such an easy shot to pull off, and the bride’s family will absolutely go crazy for it. You need just one flash and a softbox (see page 116 for the softbox I use), and ideally, you’ll want to shoot this indoors. Here’s what you do: (1) Have the bride turn sideways like you’re going to do a shot of her profile (well, actually, that is what you’re going to do, a profile shot). Next, (2) position the softbox directly in front of her, so she’s looking into the center of the softbox. (3) Now, walk over, pick up the softbox, and move it straight over about two feet to the left of the bride. If you’re thinking, “Wait, now she’s not even in front of the softbox at all,” then you’re on the money. You want just the edge of the light from that softbox to hit her, and you want the side of her face closest to the camera to go almost totally black. However, if you look at the behind-the-scenes shot in the inset above, you’ll notice that it’s fairly bright in the room. Well, you’re going to use your camera settings to make the room look

really dark. (By the way, turn off your flash until you get your camera settings dialed in.) (4) Set your shutter speed at 1/125 of a second, your ISO at 100, and your f-stop to f/8 for starters, and take a test shot. If the existing light in the room isn’t pretty dark at this point, trying raising it to f/10 and take another test shot. Still not dark enough? Try f/11 or f/16. Once it’s pretty dark, turn on your flash to 1/4 power for starters (you might need to turn it down to 1/8). You want just a little light hitting the bride, like you see above. Heads up: you might have to slide the softbox a few inches back toward the spot where it was right in front of her or away from that spot to get that little bit of light to hit her cheek on the side closest to the camera.

Dramatic Bridal Portrait #2

This one is just as easy, and it uses the same camera settings, same one flash and softbox, and I would actually shoot this one right after you shoot the one on the previous page, since you’re all set up for it. The only real difference is the position of the softbox. In this case, you put it behind and to the left of your subject (as seen in the behind-the-scenes shot in the inset above), and there’s really no direct light hitting them in front at all—what little light you see hitting her face above is reflected off the bouquet she’s holding, and that was just luck. This is really a rim-lighting look—it’s lighting the outside edges of her from behind and you’ll be able to nail this look so easily. If you look at the behind-the-scenes shot above, you can see my assistant holding the softbox (well, it’s on a light stand and he’s actually holding the light stand up) behind her, and it’s a bit higher than her head, tilted down toward her, which is why you see the light on top of her hair. Also, notice that we used those

camera settings on the previous page to make the room much darker and more dramatic than it is, before we turned on our flash. That’s it—one softbox behind her on the left, up high and tilted down, with our flash at 1/4 power.

LIGHTING THE GROUP FORMALS

When you have a group of 10 or 12 people together for the formals, your first thought might be to add more lights to get the lighting even across the group. Don’t do it, because it opens up a whole can of shadows and balance problems you won’t want to deal with on wedding day. Instead, use just one light and back it way up to get even coverage across everybody. The only downside to this is you’ll have to crank up the power of your light (or flash), so have spare batteries handy.

SHUTTER SPEED: 1/1000 sec | F-STOP: F/4 | ISO: 200 | FOCAL LENGTH: 300mm

Chapter Eight

Shooting Sports Like a Pro How to Get Professional Results When You Shoot Your Next Game I’ll never forget shooting my first NFL game. It was at Soldier Field in Chicago, which is one of the most awesome outdoor stadiums in America. It’s a tower stadium built over and around the original historic Soldier Field, and when I walked out of the tunnel that night to shoot the Bears vs. Browns game, it was one of the most thrilling moments of my photography career. I shot over 1,000 images that game, but sadly, most of them were either slightly or mightily out of focus. Up to that point, I had only shot college football games, and only day games, so I didn’t have the right settings to shoot a pro football game at night. I felt like everyone on the sidelines knew more than I did, were better shooters than I was, and had their “stuff” more together than I did, and I was right. I really had no business being out there, but there was one thing I knew that they didn’t. There was one edge that I had that would help me jump to the head of the line. You see, once the players get inside the 20-yard line, they’re really too close for a sideline shooter to get an in-focus shot or they’d be in so tight, even if it was in focus, it wouldn’t be a usable shot. So, what sideline shooters do is rotate their lens 180° around the collar (the round connector they use to turn their lens vertically when it’s mounted on a monopod), and when they turn it upside down like this, they can lay their camera on the ground without it messing up the top of their camera (they’re actually lying it on the bottom of the camera when it’s rotated like this, and they often lean their camera with a monopod against the wall behind them in the end zone). Now they can use their second camera body (usually with a 24–105mm or a 70–200mm) to capture the action when it’s close up like that. Well, I saw photography legend Peter Read Miller there that night, and when he laid his camera down to switch to his second body, I walked by, popped his memory card out of his camera on the ground, and I popped my card, with the out-offocus shots, into his camera body. The rest, as they say, is history. That was

the last I ever heard from Peter. Sad.

Which Lenses to Use

GEORGE WALKER IV

When you’re shooting sports, carrying a load of lenses and a big camera bag will strain your back and add to your frustration. Instead, go light with just two lenses: (1) A wide-angle zoom lens (something that goes at least 24mm wide). You’ll need these wide angles to capture full stadium shots, full court shots, close-up group shots, etc. (2) A 300mm or 400mm telephoto lens (or a 200–400mm zoom). At the very least, you’ll need a 200mm lens, but you should plan on doing a lot of running because if the players aren’t right in front of you, they’ll be too far away to make pro-quality shots.

You won’t have time to change lenses during the action, so you’ll put one lens on one camera body, and one lens on another.

DON’T PLAN ON CHANGING LENSES

For sports photography, if you want to compete with the big boys, don’t plan on changing lenses—plan on changing cameras. You’ll miss “the shot” if you have to change lenses. That’s why the pros have multiple camera bodies hanging around their necks—so they can change from a 400mm telephoto to a wide-angle lens in an instant.

Adding a Teleconverter to Get Really Tight

If you look at some of the really amazing sports shots out there today, many of them bring you really, really close to the action. They bring you emotion and action that you’d miss from wide-angle TV shots, or sitting up in the stands, or even watching on those giant stadium monitors. While I generally shoot a 400mm lens for most sports, I realized that I needed to get in even tighter— especially after having my portfolio reviewed by sports photography legend Dave Black, who encouraged me to put a 1.4x teleconverter in front of my 400mm lens (making it 560mm in length) to get even closer, and it made a tremendous difference. Whatever focal length you’re shooting, a teleconverter is a fairly inexpensive way for you to get even closer to the action and take your sports shots to the next level. Note: This works best for shooting day games or in really well-lit situations, because putting on a 1.4x tele-extender makes you lose one full stop of light, so your f/2.8 lens becomes an f/4 lens, etc. If you

use a 2x tele-extender, then you lose two stops, and you lose some sharpness, too, so I don’t think it’s worth the trade-off. By the way, Dave had a great quote about getting in close. He said, “Go big or go home!”

DON’T HAVE LONG GLASS? RENT IT FOR THE WEEK!

If you have a special game or assignment coming up, but you don’t have long enough glass to shoot it the way you want to, you can rent it. I use LensProToGo.com—they have long glass for Canon, Nikon, and Sony, including lenses for mirrorless shooters (they rent camera bodies, too), they ship overnight, and they are reasonably priced.

How the Pros Focus for Sports

If you want to get more shots in focus, you’ve got to switch to back focusing (where you focus by pressing a button on the back of your camera body with your thumb, rather than focusing by pressing your shutter button). This makes a bigger difference than you’d think, because by separating the focus from the shutter button, your camera no longer focuses, then shoots—you’ve already focused on your subject with the button on the back, so now your shutter button just shoots. This back focusing helps to keep the autofocus from jumping off your subject when someone walks into your frame (which is a real struggle when shooting team sports), because if someone does walk into your frame (like a ref), you just take your thumb off the back focus button until they’re gone (but keeping shooting), and when they’re out of your frame, just hit the back focus button again. Generally, I keep my thumb on that back focus button, aim at my subject, and then I don’t have to worry about my focus

—I just concentrate on my timing. On Canon cameras, press the Menu button on the back of the camera, go to your Custom Function IV-1 menu, and choose Metering Start/Metering and AF Start. On most Nikons, go to the Custom Setting menu and, under Autofocus, choose AF Activation, and set it to AF-ON Only. On Sony Alphas, go to Camera Settings 1 and, under AF, set the AF w/ Shutter Value to OFF.

Change Your Focus Mode for Sports

I know I talked about this in a previous chapter, but it bears repeating here because without changing your focus mode, you’re going to wind up with a ton of out-of-focus shots. It’s because your camera, by default, is set at a focus mode for non-moving objects. It’s set for shooting still lifes and things that don’t move. By switching your camera to a continuous autofocus mode, the focus now locks on moving objects automatically, so as you pan along with the athlete (or race car), your camera uses predictive tracking to anticipate which way the subject is moving and it stays right with them. This type of focusing technology in today’s cameras is really amazing and they do a pretty outstanding job most of the time (though a player or ref crossing into the frame will sometimes have the focus jump onto them, and you wind up with a really crisp shot of the ref and your player is totally out of focus, which is precisely why we wind up drinking. Not during the game, mind you. After, when we look at our images on our computers and see the sharp ref shot. Note: This only happens on really important key plays when you would have captured the peak

moment of action and possibly snagged a cover shot, or an award, or a date with a big celebrity. That’s when we drink).

STABILITY FOR SHOOTING SPORTS

Sports shooters generally use monopods instead of tripods because they are easy to move, and many professional sports that ban tripods allow monopods. Carbon fiber ones are popular and can hold a lot of weight, but are surprisingly lightweight.

Which F-Stop to Use for Sports

This is a pretty easy one because for nearly every sport, we use the same f-stop —the lowest one our lens will allow (which for pro sports lenses is usually f/2.8). Shooting at this wide open of an f-stop will pay off in two ways: (1) This will blur the background, which helps visually separate your athlete from the background, and this is huge. When you get that separation, it creates a more dramatic, dynamic, and uncluttered photo of your athlete. Distracting, busy backgrounds are a big problem when shooting sports, and by shooting with a long telephoto lens at a wide open aperture (like f/2.8 or f/4), it gives you a very shallow depth of field, so the athlete in the foreground is in sharp focus, while the background is out of focus (well, as long as the player isn’t too close to the background behind them. You need some distance between the player and the background to have it be out of focus).

(2) It lets you shoot at faster shutter speeds, which will freeze the action of the athletes (see the next page on freezing motion). When you shoot at low-numbered f-stops like this, it lets in more light, so in daylight, you’ll have super-fast shutter speeds (not unusual to be at 1/4000 of a second or faster), and if you shoot indoors or under the “Friday Night Lights,” it will help you freeze the action without having to crank your ISO too high.

The Right Shutter Speed for Sports

There is a minimum shutter speed we go for because we need to freeze the action of the athlete (or the race car, or the horse, or the motorcycle), so our images come out super-sharp and detailed. That minimum shutter speed is 1/1000 of a second. Ideally, we’d like it a little faster (1/1250 of a second), but we can get away with 1/1000. If your shutter speed drops, down to even 1/800 of a second, you’re going to have some blur in your shots. They’re not going to be as sharp and crisp, like the ones you see online or in magazines. You might get lucky here and there and get a decently sharp shot below 1/1000, but why risk it? If you’re shooting on a nice sunny day (using the right f-stop; see the previous page), this will not be a problem. Heck, you’ll probably be at 1/8000 of a second. On a cloudy day, it will definitely affect the amount of light, and you might be down to 1/2000 or less. On a really cloudy and/or overcast day, it will dip below 1/1000, and now you’re in trouble. How do you

get your shutter speed up if it’s cloudy (or you’re shooting indoors)? You have to raise your ISO because raising your ISO will get you faster shutter speeds. I recommend using Auto ISO when you’re shooting sports (see the next page) because you can’t take a chance on your shutter speed falling below that allimportant 1/1000 of a second threshold. Without it, it’s easy to get burned because courts and fields and tracks usually aren’t evenly lit, and when the action moves to a different part of the field, the lighting isn’t as good, and . . . blurry picture! One way or another, you’ve got to be sure to keep your shutter speed above 1/1000 of a second for most sports.

Auto ISO Makes Sure You Freeze the Action

If you’re shooting a sport where you need to freeze the action, then you need to make sure you’re shooting at a shutter speed that freezes action—around 1/1000 of a second. That’s easy to do in broad daylight shooting at a wide open aperture like f/2.8 or f/4, like we would normally do with sports, but if it gets cloudy, or the light changes, or it gets later in the day, you run the risk of your shutter speed falling below 1/1000 and coming home with a bunch of blurry sports shots. That’s why you’ll fall in love with the Auto ISO feature, which makes sure you never fall below a certain shutter speed because it will automatically increase the ISO without any input from you. What’s especially slick about this is it won’t just jump from 200 ISO to 400 ISO, it’ll only move exactly as much as it needs, so it might go from 200 ISO to 273 ISO (something you couldn’t even choose on your camera if you wanted to, right?). Canon, Nikon, and Sony cameras all have this feature, so just check your manual for how to turn it on.

THE ADVANTAGE OF USING FAST MEMORY CARDS

Fast memory cards were made for sports shooters, because we usually shoot in continuous shooting (burst) mode. Faster cards write data faster, so the images in your camera’s buffer leave it quicker (leaving room for you to take more continuous shots).

Shooting at Night or Indoors? Raise Your ISO!

The biggest challenge of shooting sports happens when you shoot at night, or if you shoot indoors. That’s because, without that bright sunlight, your shutter speed will drop like a rock. There’s really only one way around this—you’ll have to raise your ISO like crazy to get your shutter speed back up to 1/1000 of a second to freeze sports action. So, why do we worry so much about raising the ISO? Well, it’s because the higher you raise your ISO, the more noise (grain) you’ll see in your photos. Today’s high-end sports cameras have very low noise, even at very high ISOs, but it’s still sometimes visible. But, really, there’s nothing we can do about it. This is why “fast lenses” (like an f/2.8 or f/4) are so helpful—the faster the lens you have, the less you’ll have to raise your ISO (and the less noise you’ll have). So, how much of a difference does a fast lens really make? Well, if I’m shooting in an NFL football stadium at night with really bright stadium lighting, and I set my f-stop to f/4, I have to set my ISO around 4,000 to get my shutter speed up to 1/1000 of a second. If I have an f/2.8 lens, I can usually set it at just 1,600 ISO (much less noise). That one

stop makes that big a difference (but man do they charge you a bundle for that one extra stop of light). So, you will see some noise, but seeing some noise beats having a blurry photo every single time.

Shooting in Burst Mode

Much of the shooting you’ll be doing in sports photography will require you to take bursts of shots (multiple shots per second) in order to make sure you get the shot while a play is in motion. So, you’ll need to set your camera to shoot multiple shots for as long as you hold down the shutter button (this is called burst mode on some digital cameras). By default, most cameras shoot one frame at a time, so you’ll have to switch this burst mode on. Here are a few examples of how to turn it on, but of course, it depends on which make/model you own (just check your manual): Canon: Press the Drive or AF•Drive button, then rotate the quick control dial until you see an icon that looks like a stack of photos on the top LCD panel. Nikon: Press-and-hold the Release Mode button on the back of the camera and turn the main command dial to CH (for Continuous High Speed). Sony: From the Drive Mode dial on the top of the camera, choose Continuous Shooting: Hi. Now, you can simply hold down the shutter button to fire multiple shots.

THE ADVANTAGE OF SHOOTING FROM THE END ZONE

If you shoot football, you’ll see a lot of pros jockeying for space in the end zone and the corners of the end zone so they have a clear, unobstructed line of sight, and they’re in position if someone breaks loose to “take it to the house.” The only “gotcha” is that if possession changes, you have to decide if you want to go to the opposite end zone.

Using a Remote Camera

Having a second camera aimed at a different part of the field (or track, or arena, etc.) gives you a huge advantage, because you can cover two different areas at the same time. For example, if you’re shooting baseball from the dugout, covering the batter with your main camera, you can have a second camera aimed at second base, and when you see a play happen there, you can press the trigger button on your remote to fire your second camera. It’s actually fairly easy to set up a system like this. First, you’ll need two wireless transmitters (I use and recommend PocketWizard Plus IIIs)—one connects to your remote camera (PocketWizard sells the small cable you need to connect it), and you hold the other. When you see the action come into the view of your remote camera, press-and-hold the remote button and it fires the shots (I always set my remote camera to shoot a burst of shots for as long as I hold the remote button down. I also pre-focus on the spot I want [like second base

itself], then switch my focus to Manual, so it doesn’t change when I press the remote button). I would also get: (1) a Manfrotto Super Clamp with a Manfrotto Variable Friction Magic Arm with Camera Bracket—this lets you mount the camera to all sorts of surfaces (like railings) by just clamping it on, and then you can position it to capture the action. And, (2) two safety cables to double secure your rig, so if something comes loose, your gear doesn’t hit the floor or fall or, worse yet, hit somebody.

Our Goal: Capture the Peak Moment of Action

I did an online course for KelbyOne on “what makes a great sports photo,” and it featured a living legend of sports photography, the great Peter Read Miller. Even if you don’t know his name, you’ve seen his amazing sports photography on the covers and pages of the biggest sports magazines and websites. During the course, I really pressed Peter to articulate exactly what makes a great sports photo, and he laid it right out: a great sports photo is one that captures the “peak moment of action.” It’s not a guy running with the ball. It’s the moment that guy get hits, and the ball pops out, and you can see the look on both his face and the guy-that-hit-him’s face as they realize what happened. If you’ve got that shot, you’ve captured the peak moment of action. It’s not a guy dribbling down the basketball court. It’s the player you’ve captured way up in the air, going over the center to dunk a shot, and their expressions as both he and the center know the center has been burned. That’s a peak moment.

That’s what we’re going for, and that’s the type of shot we want to come back with. It takes timing, and skill, and a bit of luck, but those are the types of shots that make the viewer say, “Wow!,” and “Wow!” is what we’re shooting for.

STILL PLAYERS ARE BORING

Don’t shoot football players in the huddle or standing around, or the runner standing with one foot on first base, or the outfielder waiting for a pop fly. Shoot the peak action because when you look at your photos later, you’ll wind up deleting shots without it.

The Two Most Popular Sports Shots

Based on my research, magazines and sports sites generally seem to love two types of images: (1) Action images, where the ball (if the sport you’re shooting uses a ball) is in the frame with the athlete, or ideally, two or more athletes. (2) Celebrations (called “jubilation” or just “jube,” as in, “Did you get the jube shot after the interception?”). Jubes are one or more players celebrating after a big play, or a score, or a win, but occasionally, it’s a shot of an athlete who just suffered a crushing defeat as well. These are shots that tell the story of a part of the game, or the win or loss itself. Also, they’re usually often cropped tight in on the players, so you can see their facial expressions and the emotion of the game. These are two types of shots you want to be sure to capture the next time you’re shooting a game.

DON’T ALWAYS FOCUS ON THE WINNER

In sports photography, it’s only natural to follow the winner. But, if you only cover the winner, you might miss some of the most dramatic shots with the most powerful storytelling angle, which are the expressions and reactions of the loser or the losing team. This is especially important if you just missed the action play—quickly switch to the reaction of the guy who missed the ball, or didn’t block the shot, or missed the goal, etc. Sometimes their reactions are more fascinating than those of the person who makes the shot.

Pros Know the Sport & Shoot the Details

If you know the sport you’re shooting, you’ll get better shots because you’ll know where the next play is likely to unfold. Being able to anticipate when and where the big moment will unfold can make all the difference. The key is you have to watch the event while you’re shooting. Part of that is knowing a sporting event is more than the players. Today, it’s about the arena itself; it’s about the fans; it’s about all the sights and sounds that surround the event (sports news services always ask for these types of storytelling shots). For example, when I’m shooting football, I always shoot a nice close-up of both teams’ helmets (there’s usually at least one sitting prominently on an equipment case in the bench area) or the football sitting there by itself just after the ref places it on the field for the next down. For baseball, I shoot a lone glove sitting on the bench, or some bats leaning against the wall in the dugout, or even a close-up of home plate. Make sure you keep these in mind to

shoot between innings, quarters, periods, etc. So, if you’re assigned to shoot a sport you don’t know well, go watch some videos, go buy some magazines on the topic, and study how the pros that cover that sport are shooting it.

COMPOSING FOR SPORTS

When shooting athletes, the most important thing to capture, generally, is their face. Their facial expressions tell the story. To take it to the next level, try including the ball, as well. Now, when composing your sports images, give your athlete somewhere to go. Don’t compose the shot so they’re running out of the frame and look boxed in.

Pan to Show Motion

We’ve talked about using super-fast shutter speeds to freeze motion, but there are times when it’s more dramatic to emphasize the motion and let parts of the photo become intentionally blurry from movement. There are three keys to this technique: (1) Use a slow shutter speed—ideally, either 1/30 of a second or 1/60 of a second with a long lens and 1/4 of a second or less with a wide-angle lens. So, switch to shutter priority mode and set the shutter speed accordingly. (2) Pan right along with your subject, following them with your camera. It’s the camera’s motion that creates the blurred background because you’re moving (panning) with the athlete, so they remain sharp while everything around them appears blurred.

(3) Use continuous shooting (burst) mode for your best chance to capture a sharp shot—capturing multiple shots per second really pays off here. One important thing to remember: Don’t stop panning when the athlete leaves your frame. Continue panning for a couple of seconds afterward to get a smooth release.

FREEZING MOTION TRICK FOR MOTORSPORTS

You can shoot car racing at really high shutter speeds when the cars are coming almost straight at you. If you can’t really see the wheels, you can’t tell they’re not spinning. Switch your camera to aperture priority mode, then shoot wide open at the lowest numbered f-stop your lens will allow, and focus your camera on the driver’s helmet.

It’s All About the Crop!

I hate cropping. If I have to crop a photo after I’ve taken it, it kind of makes me feel like I’ve failed at my most basic job as a photographer—deciding what to include in the frame. So, I rarely do it, except for sports, where I crop all the time and feel no remorse whatsoever. I have to. All sports photographers (especially the pros) do it because, for most sports, the play often moves away from you in a split-second. Even with a 400mm lens, outfielders and running backs look tiny in your frame, you can’t even make out who the soccer players are downfield, so we have to crop in tight (in Photoshop, Lightroom, etc.) to create dynamic-looking images. It’s a part of sports photography and the tighter the better! Also, the shorter the lens you have, the more you’ll be doing it. This is one reason why having a higher-megapixel camera is a big benefit to a sports photographer—you can crop an image in tight and still have plenty of resolution for print or the web. Another reason tight cropping is so important is

that most sports images are viewed on the displayed at a small size, so your image has the viewer’s attention. One more thing: when yourself, “Man, that’s really a tight crop!” tighter!

web, where they’re going to be to jump off the screen and grab you’re cropping and you think to that’s your cue to crop it even

WHY YOU NEED TO SHOOT THE WARM-UPS

Show up early and experiment with your settings while the players are warming up. Also, you need to warm up, as well. If it’s been a week or more since your last sports shoot, you need some time to shake the rust off and get back into the groove.

Two Eyes and a Ball

There’s a saying in the sports photography business about what makes a good, solid sports shot, and that is that a great shot needs “two eyes and a ball.” Of course, we’re talking about sports that actually use a ball, so tennis, football, rugby, baseball, basketball, beach volleyball, softball, water polo, and so on. If you’re shooting hockey, then it’s “two eyes and a puck.” You get the idea. So, you need to see the athlete’s eyes in the shot, and you need to see them holding, running, hitting—doing something with the ball in the frame. This alone won’t make a great sports shot, but it’s kind of the starting place—the building block from which great shots are made. That being said, from time to time, you’ll see a shot on the cover of a big sports magazine where you don’t see either the eyes or the ball. It happens, but it’s always a pretty amazing shot on that cover, so that helps overcome the fact that it doesn’t have two eyes and ball. But, if you start shooting sports for a school, or wire service, or team,

don’t be surprised if some of your shots get rejected for not having two eyes and a ball.

SHOOT FROM A LOW POSITION

Pro sports photographers often shoot down on one knee to get a lower, and better, perspective for their shots. It gives you the feeling of being right there, and helps to make the athletes (or their cars) look “bigger than life.” Try it next time, but just make sure you buy some gel-filled knee pads from the local home improvement store first.

SHUTTER SPEED: 1/125 sec | F-STOP: F/18 | ISO: 100 | FOCAL LENGTH: 24mm

Chapter Nine

Shooting Other Stuff Like a Pro How to Shoot All That Other Stuff We Wind Up Shooting There are some things we wind up shooting in photography that don’t have an official name. These things are known, in photography circles, as “stuff.” Now, just because it’s called “stuff” doesn’t mean we don’t want to shoot this stuff well. We want to crush it. We want to shoot it like a pro. But, we can also use it to poke fun at other photographers. For example, if one of your friends was shooting a hot air balloon race, and somebody asked where they were, you might answer, “They’re off shooting some stuff,” and we’d all know what you meant, and we’d chuckle. So, why do we do things like this? Why do we poke fun at other photographers? Well, it actually does double duty: it keeps us from practicing our craft, and it keeps the other photographer down, which on some level, helps us fulfill our roles as “the man,” and now we can be blamed for their lack of success. But, I thought “the man” was the government or big business? Common misconception. “The man” is the person (male or female) whose role it is to make sure photographers starve throughout their careers, much like record companies (“the man”) make sure musicians maintain their starving artist appeal, in the same way librarians (“the man”) make sure assistant librarians never get Saturdays off, but somehow, the librarian is always free to go to the Savannah Book Festival or the Deckle Edge Lit Fest. But, I digress. Now, if you are a photographer, and you’re shooting something “off the books,” meaning it’s not one of the standard photographic categories, like portraits or travel, and you’re doing this “stuff” really well, you are achieving the unstated goal of every real working dog photographer like you and me, which is to “stick it to the man.” By honing your craft and shooting this “stuff” that doesn’t even have a proper name (e.g., a balloon festival), you’re a rebel. You’re shaking things up (light spirals). Breaking through the status quo (steel wool sparks), and that means the world to those people out there shooting stuff that has no proper photographic name or use (e.g., indoor splash

shots). So, suit up, go out there, get some weird filters and some duct tape, maybe some cooking oils, and make a mess of the place, and know all the while, you’re totally “stickin’ it to the man,” man!

Don’t Shoot Down on Flowers

If you were to walk by some wildflowers in a field, or along a path in a garden, and you stopped and took a picture of them, you’d get your average shot. Why will it look so average? Because you shot them at the same view everybody usually sees flowers—looking down at them. If you want to create flower shots with more visual interest, you have to shoot them from an angle we don’t see every day. That usually means not shooting down on them, and instead, getting down low and shooting them from their level. This is another one of those things the pros routinely do and most amateurs miss. The shots above show the difference: on the left, the typical “shooting down on flowers” shot; on the right, the same flower in the same light, using the same focal length lens, shot 30 seconds later, but I shot it from the side (down on one knee) instead of shooting down on it. You can see the difference shooting a non-typical angle makes. By the way, while you’re down there, try getting really low (down below

the flowers) and shoot up at them for a fascinating angle you rarely see!

TIPS FOR SHOOTING FLOWERS

Where do you get great flowers? At your local florist, but (bonus tip here) when you get there, tell the florist you’re buying the flowers to photograph them. It’s been my experience that the florist will go to extraordinary lengths to make sure you get a perfect specimen to photograph (I love that about florists). In fact, oftentimes, they’ll invite me to go back in the cooler with them as we hunt for just the right one. You’ll come out of there with a perfect, fresh, gorgeous flower. (Note: You would make the florist’s day if you emailed them one of your favorite flower shots.)

Don’t Wait for Rain—Fake It!

This one may sound cheesy at first, but you’ll be shocked at how well this works. Instead of waiting for a rainy day to shoot, take a little spray bottle with you, fill it with water, and spray the flowers with water yourself. I found a nice little spray bottle in Walgreens’ beauty section (I know what you’re thinking, “Walgreens has a beauty section?”) for a couple of bucks, and it works wonders. Just a couple quick spritzes with the spray bottle and you’ve got some lovely drops of water on your petals, and no one will know you didn’t wait patiently for Mother Nature to intervene. Get a small enough bottle and you can carry it in your camera bag. I’ve used this spray bottle technique to shoot some yellow roses using a macro lens, and you’d swear I was shooting at Queen Mary’s Garden after a spring shower. Try this once—you’ll become a believer.

Flowers on a Black Background

One of the most dramatic compositions for shooting flowers is to position a single flower on a black background. You can add a black background in Photoshop, but in most cases, that is just way too much work. Instead, do what the pros do: put a black background behind your flower when you shoot it. Photographer Vincent Versace shared this trick with me many years ago: he wears a black jacket while out shooting flowers, and if he sees a flower he wants on a black background, he has his assistant (or a friend, or his wife, or a passerby, etc.) hold the back of his jacket behind the flower. I know, it sounds crazy—until you try it yourself. If you’re shooting flowers indoors, buy a yard of either black velvet or black velour (velvet runs around $10–15 per yard; velour runs around $5–10 per yard) and put it behind your flowers. You can prop it up on just about anything (I hate to admit it, but I’ve even propped up my velour background by draping it over a box of Cookie Crisp cereal). Leave a few feet

between your flowers and the black background (so the light falls off and the black looks really black) and then shoot away. As for light for flower shots? I prefer natural light if I can get it, so set up your flower shoot a few feet away from a window (a north-facing window if you have one, so you don’t have harsh light falling directly on your flower).

SAVE YOUR KNEES WHEN SHOOTING FLOWERS OUTDOORS

If you’re going to be shooting a lot of flowers, there’s an inexpensive accessory that doesn’t come from the camera store: gel-filled knee pads. They will become your best friend. Find them at Home Depot, Lowe’s, or any good gardening store.

Use a Macro Lens to Get Really Close

A macro lens is my first choice when shooting flowers because it lets you get a close-up 1:1 view of your subject and reveal flowers in a way that only macro lenses can, like in those incredible close-up views usually only seen by bees during their pollination duties. Another benefit of macros is that they have a very shallow depth of field—so much so that when photographing a rose, the petals in the front can be in focus and the petals at the back can be out of focus. If you don’t have a macro, try a close-up lens to turn your telephoto zoom lens into a macro lens for 1/4 of the price (see page 142). And, finally, regular zoom lenses can work great for shooting flowers, too (see page 174 for more on that). By the way, you must (see how that’s set off in italics for emphasis?), must, must shoot macro on a tripod (see the tip at the bottom of the next page). When you’re really in tight on a flower, any tiny bit of movement will ruin your photo, so use every technique on getting sharp photos

in Chapter 1 to capture this amazing new world of macro flower photography. Another popular technique with the pros is to do focus stacking, where you take multiple shots of the flower with a different part of it in focus in every shot, and then you have Photoshop automatically combine all the sharp areas into a shot that has greater focal depth than you could get with just one macro shot (due to the super-shallow depth of field with macro lenses). There’s more on focus stacking on page 186.

Which F-Stop Works Best for Macro

Is there an f-stop that works best for macro shots? Well, yeah. It’s f/16. Because the depth of field of macro lenses is so shallow (meaning, the front of that flower you’re shooting can be perfectly in focus and the petal just one inch behind it can be totally out of focus), you need to get as broad a depth as possible, and that comes when your aperture setting is at something like f/16. Now, technically speaking, the higher the f-stop number, the more of your photo will be in focus, so you might be tempted to use an even higher numbered f-stop, like f/22 (or even f/32 if your lens allows it). Don’t do it. While those would technically give you greater depth, the trade-off is that you lose some sharpness and detail at f/22 or higher. That’s why I (and many macro pros these days) recommend you go with something more like f/16, because it has that added depth and it’s still a pretty sharp f-stop all the way around. That’s my long-winded way of saying, “Hey, just use f/16 for macro.”

THIS IS TRIPOD TERRITORY

Although there are macro lenses that have built-in image stabilization (IS) or vibration reduction (VR), if you’re serious about macro, you’ll be serious about how sharp your images are, which means you seriously need a tripod. A tripod may well be the single most important piece of your “making great macro shots” puzzle, so although you can cut a lot of corners in other areas, shooting on a tripod is one thing you absolutely, positively should do. They haven’t yet come up with a built-in stabilizer that holds a camera as steady as even the cheapest tripod.

Turn Autofocus Off for Shooting Macro

One of the big challenges of macro photography is getting things sharp and in focus, and you’re about to realize that one of the things that can be the most frustrating is using autofocus when you’re as close in on your subject as you are with macro shooting. If I can give you one tip that will lower your frustration level by a hundred, it’s to turn off the autofocus on your camera’s lens and manually focus instead. I know, you hate to give up the autofocus feature because, honestly, on today’s cameras, it’s really amazingly accurate. That is, until you shoot macro. What will happen is your camera will try to find a focus point, and you’ll hear the whirring of the lens as it tries to snap onto something, anything, to focus on, and while it’s getting frustrated, so are you. Just switch over to manual focus, and you’ll both be better off. Also, if your lens has a built-in stabilizer, since you’ll be shooting on a tripod, turn this feature off (see page 14 for more on IS/VR).

DON’T TOUCH THAT SHUTTER BUTTON!

If you’re going to the trouble of putting your camera on a tripod (and you absolutely should), you can still get a “less-than-tack-sharp” photo from the vibration that happens when you push the shutter button. That’s why, when shooting macro, you should either use a remote shutter release (a wired or wireless remote that lets you take a shot without touching the shutter button on the camera itself) or use your camera’s self-timer, which takes the shot for you about 10 seconds after you press the shutter button, so any vibration caused by your pressing the shutter button will be long gone.

Shooting Flowers with a Zoom Lens

You don’t have to have a macro (close-up) lens to take great flower shots. Long telephoto lenses (like anything 150mm or longer) work great for shooting flowers for two reasons: (1) You can usually zoom in tight enough to have the flower nearly fill the frame—you just have to stand back a few feet and then zoom in tight. And, (2) it’s easy to put the background out of focus with a telephoto lens, so you get that all-important separation from the background, and the focus of the shot is just on the flower. Start by shooting in aperture priority mode, then use the lowest numbered f-stop your lens will allow. Try to isolate one flower, or a small group of flowers that are close together, and then focus on just that flower (and, of course, it helps if you use the “get down to their level” trick from page 168 to create a more interesting and dynamic perspective).

When to Shoot Bracketed

Let’s say you’re in a cathedral with light streaming through the beautiful stained glass windows. You’re standing there and it looks amazing, but part of the reason it looks so amazing is our eyes. They’re so good that they’re able to perfectly adjust for the huge disparity of light between the windows up high and the dimly lit interior of the cathedral. However, your camera’s sensor isn’t nearly that good. Not even close. So, you’re either going to have a photo where the stained glass windows are properly exposed, or one where the church interior is properly exposed but the windows are totally blown out. This is where you want to shoot bracketed exposures (a normal shot, one that’s 2 stops underexposed, and one that’s 2 stops overexposed), so you can later combine those images into one single image that has a higher dynamic range (called an HDR image). Now, if just hearing the term “HDR” conjures up the old, unrealistic, fakey, weird HDR from around 2007, then thankfully, that phase is

mostly behind us. Today, when we create an HDR image it pretty much looks like the original, but with an expanded tonal range, so we can do those things like shooting a cathedral where the windows aren’t blown out and the interior isn’t dark. You get enhanced detail and much lower noise (Lightroom’s and Photoshop’s secret weapon) without all the crazy stuff. All you have to do incamera is turn on exposure bracketing (yes, your camera has this feature) and I cover how to do that on the next page.

How to Shoot a Bracketed Shot for HDR

The first part of this HDR process is the bracketed shooting. You’re going to set your camera up to shoot a series of shots of the same thing, without moving at all. What you basically need is one regular shot, one shot that is underexposed (darker) by two stops of light, and one that is overexposed (brighter) by two stops of light—three images total of the exact same scene. Depending on your camera’s make and model, it might let you do 2-stop bracketing (two stops over and two stops under), or it might only do one stop at a time. So, instead of just taking three bracketed photos (one regular, one 2 stops over, and one 2 stops under), you might have to take five shots (one regular, one 1 stop over, one 2 stops over, one 1 stop under, and one 2 stops under). Whew! That’s a lot of stops. The good news is, although you took five shots, Lightroom and Photoshop actually only need two—the 2 stops under and the 2 stops over—to make an HDR image (you can delete the rest—they’re not needed), and I made

a video for you on how to combine them (see page 3). Some other tips for the shooting portion: Ideally, you want to be on a tripod since you’ll be combining multiple shots. In bright light, though, you can hand-hold bracketed exposures, as well, thanks to Photoshop’s (or Lightroom’s) Auto-Align Layers feature. You’ll want to use an f-stop that keeps everything in focus (I shoot all my bracketed photos at f/11). If you use too low an f-stop, the bracketing won’t work correctly. I also turn on my camera’s self-timer feature. That way, when I press the shutter button, it fires all three photos automatically for me (if your camera needs five 1-stop brackets, then it’ll take all five). Otherwise, you have to press the shutter button three (or five) times to take the bracketed shots. It’s better to let the camera do it, so you don’t lose track of the sequence of where you are when you’re shooting. Okay, that’s it—start shooting those bracketed shots!

Including the Moon and Keeping Detail

This sounds like it would be easy—a nighttime scene, with a crisp, detailed moon in the background—but what you wind up with is a totally overexposed bright white circle, rather than the detailed moon shot you were hoping for. That’s because it’s just about impossible to get both the nighttime scene (which takes a long exposure) and a detailed shot of the moon (which takes a very short exposure because it’s actually quite bright) in the same shot. So, what photographers have been doing since there’s been photography is creating multiple exposures (two images captured in the same frame). Now, there are some digital cameras today that let you create double exposures, but it’s just as easy to take two separate photos—one of the nighttime scene (a barn, in this case), and one of the moon—and combine them later in Photoshop (you select the moon, and then it’s a simple copy-and-paste as you put this nicely detailed moon over the white blob of moonlight in the night scene photo. I

made a video for you on how to do it—it’s so easy). For your nighttime scene, use a wide-angle lens, put your camera on a tripod (an absolute must), set it to aperture priority mode, choose f/11 as your f-stop, and your camera will choose the right shutter speed for you (which may be as long as several minutes, depending on how dark the scene is), and then take the nighttime shot. Now switch to your longest telephoto (or zoom) lens (ideally 200mm or more), and then switch your camera to manual mode because you need to dial in these two settings for your moon shoot: set your aperture to f/11 and your shutter speed to 1/250 of a second. Zoom in as tight as you can get on the moon, so there’s nothing but black sky and moon in your shot (no clouds, buildings, etc.), then take your moon shot. You’ve got both shots now and the rest is very easy Photoshop stuff (again, I made a video to show you how to do this—see page 3 for where to watch it).

The Trick for Shooting a Cityscape at Night

LOCATION: SHANGHAI, CHINA

If you’re shooting a cityscape like this at night, you can continue to shoot in aperture priority (Av or A) mode like always, and it will work okay. I say “okay” because there’s a decent chance your sky will not look awesome—it will probably look over-exposed (too bright) because aperture priority mode always tries to make what it thinks is a proper exposure, and since it’s nighttime (and your camera doesn’t know it’s nighttime), it often winds up overexposing the sky or your sky winds up being a funky color, or both. So, how do we get around this? We shoot in manual mode (don’t worry—this is super-easy stuff). Before we get to our settings, two quick things: (1) You’re going to make a long exposure, so of course, you’ll need to be on a on tripod. (2) Don’t wait too late to shoot—ideally you’d like to start shooting from 15–20 minutes to maybe an hour after sunset, when the lights of the city are on but the sky isn’t solid black

yet. Then, with your camera on manual mode, dial in an f-stop that will keep everything in focus (like f/11), set your ISO to 100 (or 50 if your camera goes that low) to get a really clean shot, and then as a starting place, choose 3 seconds for your shutter speed. Now, aim your focus point at something that’s already well lit (e.g., some buildings or signs in the city) and take a test shot. If the image is too dark, try making your shutter speed longer (try 4 or 5 seconds, or even higher). If it’s too bright, make your shutter speed shorter (2 seconds). It might take you three or four test shots before you totally dial in the exposure to where the city lights don’t look too bright and the night sky looks nice and has some detail, but after just a couple of tries with different shutter speeds, you will totally nail it.

Making Your Own Product Photography Table

If you’re looking for a great surface to shoot your product shots on, look no further than your local hardware store for a large panel of white Formica. This stuff works great for a number of reasons: (1) When you put a product on white Formica, its surface is already a little reflective, so it automatically gives your product a little bit of a natural reflection (not a sharp mirror reflection like acrylic, but kind of a subtle, satin-like reflection). (2) It’s very easy to keep clean—you can just wipe it lightly with a damp cloth—so you don’t have to replace it often, like you do with white seamless paper, and (3) because it bends pretty easily, you can lie one end flat on a table, and then attach the other end to a couple of inexpensive light stands with some A-clamps, and this gives you a smooth, seamless curve behind your product, which makes it perfect for product photography. A full 4x8’ Formica laminate sheet, with a gloss or matte finish, costs around $59 at Home Depot, and believe me, it’s

worth every penny.

USING CONTINUOUS LIGHT

For product photography, I usually use continuous lights. These aren’t flashes, these are lights that stay on all the time and give bright, daylightbalanced light, but because they use fluorescent or LED bulbs, they don’t get hot, so you can even use them to light food. These work well because you can see exactly what you’re going to get—there’s no shooting a few shots, then tweaking the lights, and shooting again. Outside of the fact that they stay on all the time, they’re just like strobes, and have all the similar accessories, like softboxes (including strip banks [see next page]), and fabric grids, etc. Check out the ones from FJ Westcott—they make fluorescent and LED versions, too.

The Advantage of Using Strip Banks

Ever see a product shot of a wine bottle, or a piece of electronics, and reflected in the product you see a tall, thin, soft, rectangular reflection? Maybe even two of them? These wonderful highlight reflections are most likely from one of the mainstays of a lot of pro product shooters—a strip bank (also sometimes called a strip light). These are actually just tall, thin, rectangular softboxes (picture a softbox that’s just 18" wide, but around 36" long), and they are very popular in product photography because of those wonderful tall reflections they create in products that reflect. You can buy strip banks for strobes, or even for the Westcott Spiderlite TD6s that I use for product photography, and the nice thing about them is that you can use them tall (vertically), or turn them on their side and use them horizontally for a really wide, wrapping light.

SOME PRODUCT PHOTOGRAPHY TIPS

Use a tripod. Product shots are one of those things that if they’re not absolutely tack sharp, they just don’t work, and that’s why the pros use a tripod every time. Hide distracting stuff. Look at most professional product shots, and you’ll find that they go to great lengths to hide anything that would distract you from the presentation of the product, even if it’s a part of the product itself. Perfect example? Headphones. Sometimes there’s a cord on them, but in ads you rarely, if ever, see the cord—you just see the headphones. And, before you shoot anything, clean it first. This is one of those things that, if you don’t do it, it will take you 10 times longer to fix it in Photoshop than the 15 seconds it would have taken you to do it right in the studio.

Using Foam Core and Creating Reflections

While you’ll find portrait photographers using white reflectors a lot in the studio (usually to reflect or bounce light from the main light into the side of the face that’s in the shadows), when it comes to product photography, more often than not, you’ll find the pros using a large sheet of foam core instead. Form core tends to have a little more sheen to it than most reflectors and reflects more light. Plus, because you can cut a sheet of form core (found at most craft stores or office supply stores) down to pretty much any size you need, you can make these small enough to sit right on your product table and get right up close to your product (but just out of your viewfinder’s frame). As far as creating reflections goes: You’ll often see a reflection appear below a product, and while you can add these reflections after the fact in Photoshop, it’s easier to just have real reflections. The easy way to get those reflections is to shoot your product on a 0.98 thick sheet of acrylic (either clear or white

frosted). Just put a rectangular sheet of acrylic right over your background (you can get an 11x14" sheet for less than $7 at Home Depot or Lowe’s) and it does the rest. If you want to go for a dramatic look for your product shots, try this: go to your local home supply/hardware megastore and buy a single tile of black polished granite for around $5. This stuff is incredibly reflective and just sitting your product on it makes it scream, “Shoot me!”

Shooting Cityscapes at Dusk

I’ve been asked dozens of times what kind of settings to use for getting cityscape shots at twilight, where the sunset sky looks beautiful and the lights of the city are all on. I have good news and bad news. Which do you want first? The bad news? Okay. The bad news is: it’s not a setting. To get the sunset sky with the city lights on, you take two separate photos. With your camera on a tripod, take the first shot around sunset to get that great sunset sky. Now, without moving your camera even one inch (don’t touch it, don’t mess with it, just leave it sitting there quietly on the tripod), wait about 45 minutes to an hour until the sun has fully set, the sky is black, and all the city lights are fully on. Then (and only then), take the second shot. You have two shots now: one with a great sky and one with the city lights on. Okay, now for the good news: combining those two shots in Photoshop is absolutely simple. Even if you’ve never used Photoshop before you’ll be able to do this, especially since I made

you a step-by-step video on how to do it (see page 3 for where to watch it).

HOW HIGH TO PLACE YOUR TRIPOD FOR PRODUCT SHOTS

There are exceptions to the rule but, for the most part, we set up our tripod so our camera is shooting at the same height as the product. You generally don’t want to be shooting down on a product unless it’s import to see the top of it, in which case, shoot from a slightly higher angle than the product, but not a whole lot. This is why I use a tall table for product shots. That way, I’m not bending over all the time, but if you have a popout articulating LCD screen on the back of the camera, that’ll do the trick, too.

Shooting Light Trails

©ISTOCK/CHRIS HEPBURN PHOTOGRAPHY

When I think of light trail shots, I always think of the light trails from cars driving at night, and they’re easier to shoot than you might think. Your shutter is going to need to be open for a few seconds as the cars drive by, so you’ll definitely need to be on a tripod. Now, change your shooting mode to manual, dial in an f-stop that makes everything in focus (like f/11), and start with a shutter speed of 15 seconds (you may have to increase it to 20 seconds or more if the shot looks too dark, but 15 seconds is a good starting place). Make sure your ISO is at its cleanest setting (probably 100 ISO). When you see a car coming into your view, just press your shutter release, it’ll stay open for 15 seconds, then take a look at the image on your LCD to decide if you need to make your shutter speed longer (remember, longer shutter speeds mean longer light trails, so it’s worth a try). One of the most popular, and interesting,

locations for shooting light trails is a high vantage point—either on an overpass, or a bridge, or someplace where the cars are below you.

LOOK FOR HIGH VANTAGE POINTS

The average person’s view of a city is from the city streets (or a tour bus), so if you want more compelling photos, look for a different vantage point— one above the city. You can also ask for a hotel room on the highest available floor. If you don’t have a balcony or window you can open, you can shoot through the window if you: (1) turn off any lights in your room— they’ll cause reflections—and (2) put your lens or lens hood as close to the glass as possible. A polarizing filter can cut reflections, but you may need to shoot on a tripod.

Shooting Fireworks

This is another one that throws a lot of people (one of my best friends, who didn’t get a single crisp fireworks shot on the Fourth of July, made me include this tip just for him and the thousands of other digital shooters that share his pain). For starters, you’ll need to shoot fireworks with your camera on a tripod because you’re going to need a slow enough shutter speed to capture the falling light trails, which is what you’re really after. Also, this is where using a remote shutter release really pays off because you’ll need to see the rocket’s trajectory to know when to push the shutter button—if you’re looking in the viewfinder instead, it will be more of a hit or miss proposition. Next, use a zoom lens (ideally a 200mm or more), so you can get in tight and capture just the fireworks themselves. If you want fireworks and the background (like fireworks over Cinderella’s Castle at Disney World), then use a wider lens. Now, I recommend shooting in full manual mode because you just set two settings

and you’re good to go: (1) set the shutter speed to 4 seconds, and (2) set the aperture to f/11. Fire a test shot and look at the LCD monitor to see if you like the results. If it overexposes, lower the shutter speed to 3 seconds, then check the results again. Tip: If your camera has Bulb mode (where the shutter stays open as long as you hold the shutter release button down), this works great— hold the shutter button down when the rocket bursts, then release when the light trails start to fade. (By the way, most Canon and Nikon DSLRs have Bulb mode.) The rest is timing—because now you’ve got the exposure and sharpness covered.

Photographing Animals in a Zoo

Trips to Africa are pretty epic adventures, but they start with some very long flights (especially from the US), and a pretty hefty investment in accommodations and safari guides and shots (did I mention you need shots?). So, it’s not hard to understand why photographing exotic animals in a zoo has really become popular. I see these images fairly often when we do “Blind Photo Critiques” on my weekly podcast The Grid. We often get fooled into thinking the shots were taken in Africa on safari, and then the photographer tells us, “Nope, that was taken at the Denver Zoo.” There are a couple of tricks to getting shots in a zoo that look like shots from on safari, and the first one is a biggie: you need to frame up the shot so you don’t see anything in the background that would tip off the fact that it was shot in a zoo. This can be challenging because, while you may have an unobstructed view of an animal, the background behind them is usually either an ugly fence, or an obviously

man-made enclosure, or it just looks very different from their actual natural habitat. This can get really frustrating because, of course, the animal won’t always be in a location that lets you get the shot with a decent background. It requires a lot of patience, and you might have to walk away without getting a good shot because the animal just stays in one location or stays in an area with an ugly background. The patience part of this is really key. In the shot you see above (taken at ZooTampa at Lowry Park), I’m using a long lens (I took my 200–400mm f/4) to put the background out of focus, and I’m zoomed in tight to help avoid seeing any rails or fencing or anything that might tip you of off that this was a zoo shot. So, a long zoom and some serious patience go a long way.

Focus Stacking for Sharper Focus

This technique keeps more of our image in sharp focus, and we mostly use this in two genres of photography: macro and landscape. We’ll start with macro, since it’s probably more necessary here because the depth of field (the area of your image that will be in sharp focus) is so shallow on macro lenses that if you’re shooting a flower, the front petal of the flower can be in focus and the back can be totally out of focus (as seen in the image above). Artistically, that can sometimes look cool, but when you do want a lot more in focus, we use focus stacking, which is when we shoot four (or five) shots, focusing on different parts of our subject. For example, when shooting a flower (on a tripod, of course) the first shot might be focused on the petal closest to the camera, then you move the focus point (using the controller on the back of your camera) a little further into your photo, so the second shot is of the stamen, the next shot is of the pistil in the center, and then the fourth shot is a petal

toward the back of the flower. So, you wind up with four shots, each focusing on a different part of the flower (this works similarly for landscapes: focus on your foreground object, then further into the image, then any mountains in the background, and then the clouds behind them). Photoshop can then automatically combine the in-focus areas of these four shots into a single shot that has greater focal depth than your lens can capture. You’ll open all four images in Photoshop and copy-and-paste each one onto its own layer (so they’re all in the same document). Then, in the Layers panel, select all four images, go under the Edit menu, and choose Auto-Blend Layers. When the dialog appears, choose Stack Images, click OK, and then sit back and watch the magic happen. I made a video, showing you how to do this, step by step, so make sure you check the bonus content webpage for that (see page 3).

A Tip for Shooting on an Incline

If you find yourself shooting on an incline with your tripod, here’s a tip that can save your camera from instant death. Let’s say you’re shooting on a rock or on the side of a hill. Your tripod has three legs—place only one facing you. That way, if the camera starts to tip back, the single leg acts like an anchor and keeps it from falling. If the two-legged side is facing you, with the single leg on the upslope of the rock or hillside, your camera will topple right over. So, be sure to keep the single leg on the downslope side and the two legs on the upslope side of the incline.

TIP FOR MORE STABLE SHOOTING ON A TRIPOD

When you’re shooting on a tripod, depending on the terrain, you don’t

always wind up extending your tripod’s legs all the way—sometimes you just extend one set of legs and not both. If that’s the case, the pros extend the top ones (the legs nearest the camera) first, because they’re thicker and provide more stability and balance than the thinner lower legs.

Better Than a Self-Timer for Group Shots

If you take a group shot where you need to be in the shot yourself, you probably use the self-timer feature on your camera, where you press the shutter and then have 10 seconds to get over to the group and pose before the camera takes the shot. Of course, you have to repeat this routine a few times (at least five times because somebody’s eyes will be closed, or someone isn’t smiling, or someone is looking off to the right). The next time you’re doing this “self-timer group shot routine,” while you’re walking back over to the camera to press the shutter button again, pause and look back at the group. What will you see? Misery. Oh, it’s there. Big time. While most people are begrudgingly “okay” with being a part of a quick group shot, as soon as you head back to the camera to take a second shot, you can see that it actually chips away small pieces of their souls. Most people simply hate being in group shots (it’s what separates us from the animals), so when you go back to the camera for that second or third shot, they’re thinking of ways to kill you and make it look like

an accident. That’s why you’re not going to use the “death by self-timer” group shot thing any longer and, instead, you’re going to use your camera’s timelapse feature (most cameras these days have one. Heck, your cell phone probably even has this feature). Just set it to take a photo once every second until you tell it to stop. Then, press the shutter to start the time-lapse, walk over and pose with the crowd, and then after about 10 seconds, tell everyone, “We’re done. Thanks everybody” because you already have at least 10 shots (or however many you set it to take). At this point, they’re stunned and thrilled because it’s over so quickly and, invariably, one person in the group will start that slow-clap thing, and then others will join in, and it picks up the pace, until it’s a full-on standing ovation, as you are now their favorite photographer. Ever.

If It’s Cold Outside, Bring Extra Batteries

Another thing the pros have learned is that camera batteries don’t last nearly as long in cold weather. So, if you’re going out shooting in the snow or on a very cold day, you’d better bring at least one or two backup batteries for your camera or it could turn into a very short shoot. I’m pretty aggressive about not running out of batteries in general, so I carry the Think Tank Photo DSLR Battery Holder 4, which holds four backup batteries in a nice soft-sided case. It’s about $18, and yes, you can probably find a cheaper one (okay, you absolutely can find cheaper ones), but this Think Tank one will last you for 10 years (or at least until your camera manufacturer decides to switch which type of batteries they use for the new camera you’re going to be getting in a few years, and then . . . well . . . you’re hosed). Until then, you’ll be rolling with five batteries (one in the camera and four in the holder), so if you start burning through them in the cold, you’re covered. By the way, I use the same trick with

my battery holder that I use with my memory card holder (see page 206). Works like a charm.

SHUTTER SPEED: 1/200 sec | F-STOP: F/5.6 | ISO: 400 | FOCAL LENGTH: 15mm

Chapter Ten

Pro Tips for Getting Better Photos Tricks of the Trade for Making Better Shots and Better Decisions When I was writing this book, there were some techniques that I felt should be included in the book, but that didn’t fit neatly into any of the other chapters. They aren’t wedding photography techniques or landscape photography techniques or sports photography techniques, but they are techniques that could be useful when you’re shooting weddings, or landscapes, or sports. Now, if this sounds like I’m breaking from my usual rule of making these chapter intros completely worthless merely a mental break from all the learning, I want you to realize that we’re only seven lines into this intro, and I could easily divert from this semi-helpful intro information and devolve into . . . say . . . a Chapter-Five-style rap. Awwww, yeah. It’s time for a rap! [Rap to the tune of “Rapper’s Delight” by Sugar Hill Gang. If you’re too young to recognize the song “Rapper’s Delight,” feel free to rap to the tune “Straight Outta Compton” by N.W.A—hey, it could work.] Anyway, without further ado: “Now, what you shoot is not just stuff, I’m even talkin’ about weddings. And me, the groom, and the bride are gonna try to keep you from sweating. See, I am Wonder Scott, and I’d like to say hello. To the product and the floral and the automotive photographers, shooting cars in purple and yellow.” Okay, I’m going to pull the plug on this rap—it’s a bit more challenging than I was expecting because the next line of “Rapper’s Delight” is, “But first, I gotta bang bang, the boogie to the boogie, say up jump the boogie to the bang bang boogie,” which is kinda tough to sling some photography terms around, so I’m stickin’ a fork in this one, and wishing I actually had one for “Straight Outta Compton,” because you can rhyme “Compton” with “coffin,” which was a word born to be a rap lyric, just like “Hampton,” as in “We’re spending the weekend in the Hamptons.” Maybe this rap thing isn’t for me. Hey, how about I write a verse from “American Pie,” but with photography terms? No? Hello? Is there anybody out there?

Is It Better to Underexpose or Overexpose?

There have been some theories bouncing around a few of the photography forums on the web that claim that you should underexpose by a stop for digital photography. First off, let me say this: your goal (my goal, our common goal) is to get the proper exposure. That’s our goal. Always. But, if that’s not possible, if given a choice between overexposing (a photo that’s a bit too light) and underexposing (a photo that’s a bit too dark), go with overexposing—you’ll have less noise. That’s because noise is most prevalent in the shadows, and if you have to lighten an underexposed photo in Photoshop or Lightroom, you’re lightening (increasing) the noise in the photo. That’s why it’s better to shoot lighter (overexposed), because darkening a photo doesn’t increase noise the way lightening it does. So, if you’d rather have one over the other, overexpose (but again, our goal is to do neither. That’s why we bought these fancy cameras with their highly advanced metering systems).

WHAT TO USE PHOTOSHOP FOR

If you’re shooting in RAW, then you’re going to use Lightroom or Photoshop’s Camera Raw to process your RAW photos, but once you leave

Lightroom or Camera Raw and you’re in the regular part of Photoshop, the idea is to use Photoshop to finish your photos—not fix them. You want to spend your Photoshop time being creative and having fun, not fixing things you should have done correctly in the camera.

Want to Be Taken Seriously? Start Editing

If you want to be taken seriously as a photographer and you want people to start to view you as a pro-quality photographer, then take a tip from the working pros, which is: only show your very best work. Period. One thing that makes a pro a pro is they’re really good photo editors—they’re really good at picking, and only showing, their very best stuff. You don’t see their so-so shots or the shots that would have been great, if only . . . . You also don’t see them showing seven or eight similar shots of the same subject. Only show your best of the best. That means if you went on a trip and you took 970 shots, you don’t come home and show a slide show of 226 images. If you want people to think you’re good, show your best 30. If you want people to think you’re great, show just your best 10. Think about it: If you took 970 shots, maybe 400 are decent. Out of those decent shots, maybe 80 are pretty good. Out of those 80, maybe 30 are really good. Out of those 30, maybe 10 are outstanding. Now,

just show those 10—and blow people away. (Just ask yourself what you would rather see—80 pretty good shots, or 10 outstanding shots.)

HOW TO BE A GREAT PHOTO EDITOR OF YOUR OWN WORK

Your shots have to stand on their own, without you telling a story about why you like a shot. If you have to explain to someone why you chose it or why you think it’s special, it doesn’t belong in your portfolio.

One Way to Get Better Faster

If a friend asked me for just one thing they could do today that would have the biggest impact on their photography, I would tell them to go to Instagram and find the photographer they want to be. Look for photographers who are taking the types of photos they want to be taking, and follow those photographers, so they can see their images every day. We all need to see the kind of images we want to be making again and again. Even though we might not be able to make these types of images now, it gives us something to aim for. A direction. A goal. If we know the kind of images we want to make, and we head down that path, that’s the only way we’ll get there. So, if my friend wanted to be a great

landscape photographer, I would tell them to go to Instagram and in the search field, just type “#landscapephotography,” and they will be blown away by the top landscape photographers sharing their work on there. Start following them, and looking at their images every day (here are a few I follow: @danielkordan, @maxrivephotography, @kilianschoenberger, @albertdrosphotography, and @bernabephoto). If you’re into portraits, do a search, and then follow your favorites (I follow @juliakuzmenko, @emilysoto, @danidiamondphotography, @danwintersphoto, and @bollinger.photo). Whatever genre of photography you’re interested in, the top photographers are sharing their images on Instagram, and you want to flood your stream with images that inspire you. But don’t just look at them, study them. What type of light are they shooting in? Which type of lenses are they using? Wide-angle? Tight zooms? Ultra wides? What type of color do you see in their images? Bright, bold colors? Desaturated colors? Warm tones? Cool tones? Try to figure out how their shots were taken, and each time you do, you’re that much closer to making those same types of images yourself.

WHIMS Will Keep You Out of Trouble

When you show up for a shoot, excited and hyped, do you slow down to doublecheck all your critical settings before you start shooting? Yeah, me neither. I’ve been burned by this so many times that I had to come up with an acronym to help me remember to check my camera settings first, so I don’t mess up an entire shoot. For example, I spent a beautiful sunrise in Utah’s Monument Valley, shooting on a tripod with my ISO accidentally set at 1600 ISO (instead of 100) because I had been shooting a local band in low light the night before, and didn’t stop to check my settings before this early morning shoot. Ouch! The acronym is “WHIMS,” which stands for: W:

White balance check (make sure it’s set for the lighting condition you’re shooting under)

H:

Highlight warning (make sure it’s turned on, so you don’t keep

clipping your highlights) I:

ISO check (make sure your ISO is set correctly, so you don’t get blurry photos hand-holding or leave it set way too high when you’re on a tripod)

M:

Mode check (make sure you’re in the right shooting mode. I use aperture priority most of the time or manual mode when I’m using a flash)

S:

Size check (make sure you’re using the right file format [RAW or JPEG]), and if it’s JPEG you chose, make sure your image size and quality are set correctly)

Before you take your first shot that day, take 30 seconds and check your WHIMS, so you don’t wind up blowing an important shoot because your camera was set to shoot in JPEG small, like I did, shooting one day in Taos, New Mexico.

Which Format to Shoot In (RAW, JPEG, or TIFF)?

There are technically three file formats you can choose from in most cameras, but quite honestly, nobody uses TIFF any more, so it’s really down to a choice between JPEG and RAW. Here are some things that will help you decide which one is for you: JPEG images look better right out of the camera because it processes them for you, adding sharpening, contrast, noise reduction, saturation, all sorts of processing magic to make your images look good from the start. Another benefit is that the file sizes are drastically smaller because they’re compressed, so more shots fit on your memory card and take up less space on your computer. When you shoot in RAW, you’re telling your camera: “Turn off the sharpening, the contrast, the noise reduction, etc., and just give me the raw photo taken by the sensor.” Your images come out looking very flat (after all, nothing is added in-camera), so you have to add those things yourself in post-processing. So, why do the pros choose RAW? Lots of reasons, but the biggest is that they have a much wider tonal range, so you’re starting off with a higher-quality image, with smoother transitions between the tones. RAW is also much more forgiving if you didn’t nail the exposure or white balance, and if you

have to make some serious adjustments, you’ll see much less degradation compared to a JPEG. Also, rather than having the camera choose how much sharpening, vibrance, etc., to add, you start from scratch, and have more control to process the photo the way you want. Both formats have their own pluses and minuses, so which one should you use? If you’re uncomfortable with or don’t like post-processing, or just don’t want to take the time, I’d shoot in JPEG. If maximum image quality is your goal and you’re pretty decent at post, shoot in RAW (I shoot in RAW myself). Neither is wrong, so choose the one that fits you (don’t let the Internet bully you into shooting a format that’s not right for you).

Handy Uses for Your LCD Monitor

There’s a cool feature in some DSLRs that lets you use the LCD monitor on the back of the camera as a viewfinder, so you can use it to compose and shoot your image (just like a point-and-shoot). Now, it may not sound that appealing, but check this out: on some cameras, when you’re viewing the scene on your LCD, you can actually toggle through the white balance settings to see, right then and there, how each looks for that particular scene. This makes dialing in a great-looking white balance absolutely simple—just scroll through them, and when you see one that looks good, stop. Try it once, and you’ll use it again and again (especially easy to do when you’re on a tripod). Another reason to use the LCD monitor is to see if you’ve “got the shot.” And, by “got the shot,” I mean you can tell if your subject blinked, if your flash actually fired, that sort of thing. But, there’s a big potential “gotcha” that gets a lot of photographers: because the LCD monitor is so small, it can also fool you. Everything looks in focus on a tiny 3" monitor (think of it this way: even the screen on your cellphone is bigger!). When you open your photos on your computer, you might

find that the key shot from your shoot is out of focus (or your camera focused on the wrong object, so the background is in sharp focus, but your subject is blurry). This actually happens quite often because (all together now) everything looks in focus on an LCD monitor. So, you absolutely must zoom in and check your focus regularly during your shoot. If not, you’re setting yourself up for a nasty surprise later. Another way the LCD monitor will make you a better photographer is through instant creative feedback. If you take your shot, look at the LCD, and what you see disappoints you, then it challenges you to come up with something better. It makes you work the shot, try new angles, get more creative, and experiment, until you finally see on the monitor what you set out to capture in the first place.

When to Switch to Spot Metering

Most folks keep their camera’s metering mode set at their camera’s default setting, which is called Evaluative metering on Canons, Matrix metering on Nikons, or Multi-Metering on Sonys. That just means your camera looks at the entire frame and it tries to create an exposure that works for the entire image. These modes, on today’s cameras, do a pretty amazing job most of the time. However, sometimes tricky lighting situations will fool your camera’s regular metering. For example, if your subject is against a really bright background, it will fool your camera into making the scene darker, so your subject winds up too dark (like you see above left where my subject is nearly a silhouette against a bright sky late in the day). By switching to Spot metering, you’re essentially telling the camera not to look at the whole image, but just look at this one spot —this one important area (in our example, it would be our subject). So, when you put your focus point directly on your subject, it now evaluates (meters) just

your subject, not the rest of photo, and you get a better result (see above right). It works the same way when you’ve got someone on a really dark background. It tends to overexposure the image (making it too bright) because it sees so much dark in the overall image. If you miss switching to Spot metering at the time, you can usually fix these issues in Lightroom or Photoshop, but the downside is, if it’s underexposed and you have to make the image brighter, it will increase any noise in those darker areas. If you fixed it in-camera, there would be no increase in noise whatsoever. One last thing: I would only use Spot metering in tricky lighting situations like this. When you’re done, switch back to normal metering.

You Need to Copyright Your Photos

With so many of us posting our images on the web, you’ve got to protect yourself (and your images) by legally copyrighting your work. Luckily, the process (at least in the US) is all now web-based, so it has never been faster, easier, or more affordable than it is today. What copyrighting does is to legally define who owns the photo, and even though, technically, there is some very limited amount of protection afforded simply by the fact that you took the shot, if someone takes your photo off the web and uses it in their brochure, or website, or print ad, etc., without actually having registered your work as copyrighted with the US Copyright office, your chances of winning a judgment in court against the “photo thief” are virtually nil. Because this process has become so quick, easy, and inexpensive, there’s no reason not to add this process as part of your photo workflow. To register your work online in the US, start by going to copyright.gov/registration/photographs (it, currently, only costs

$55, and you can register up to 750 photos at a time for that same fee).

DON’T GET BURNED BY SHOOTING WITHOUT A MEMORY CARD

Manufacturers set cameras up so you can take shots without actually having a memory card in the camera. You see a picture appear on the LCD on the back of the camera, just like always, except those photos vanish into thin air after because they’re not saved to a memory card. So, the first thing I do with any new camera is turn the memory card lock on, so it won’t even take a shot without a memory card in the camera.

Shoot Multiple Shots in Low-Light Situations

If you’re in a situation where you have to shoot in low light without a tripod, you know there’s a pretty good chance your photo will be somewhat or very blurry if you’re hand-holding, but here’s a trick you can use that has paid off for me a number of times: set your camera to shoot in Burst mode (it might be called High-Speed Continuous on your camera), and then just hold the shutter button down and take a long series of shots (at least 20 or 30). When you open these images later on your computer, you’ll see a blurry one, and another blurry one, and another and another, but then all of a sudden, in the middle of all these blurry shots, there’s one nice crisp sharp shot (as shown above, with the five-star image labeled yellow), and then the rest are all blurry. I don’t know exactly how it happens (the law of averages? Blind luck? Even a blind squirrel finds a nut every once in a while?), but it always seems to work (I haven’t had it fail me yet). So, give this one a try next time you’re in that low-light situation and don’t want to raise your ISO to the moon. Instead, raise your ISO a bit, use

a wide-open (low-numbered) f-stop, set your camera to Burst mode, and fire away!

What Looks Good in Black & White?

Some subjects just look great when you convert them from color to black and white. So, when you’re out shooting, keep an eye out for anything with lots of texture, like peeling paint on the side of an old building, rusty old machinery, anything with an interesting shape or lots of contrast, objects with a lot of metal, old barns, old cars, old abandoned factories, and also consider cloudy days with dark menacing skies a perfect subject for black and white. Landscape and cityscape shots also look great in black and white. If you’re a Lightroom user, a quick way to see if a photo you’re looking at would look good in black and white is to press the letter V on your keyboard. This instantly converts your image to black and white. Press V again and it changes back to color.

APPLY FOR PERMITS TO SHOOT WITH YOUR TRIPOD

Many indoor locations (museums, public buildings, etc.) don’t allow shooting on tripods. But, sometimes, you can apply for a free permit to shoot on one. Just ask the locations in advance.

Shoot Landscapes with Cloudy White Balance

One landscape trick I learned many years ago was to set my camera’s White Balance setting to Cloudy, regardless of what the actual lighting situation is where I’m shooting. It gives you a warmer, overall more pleasing look to your images right out of the camera. So, if I’m shooting a landscape, you can bet I’m shooting it with my white balance set to Cloudy. Give it a shot—I think you’ll like the results a whole lot better than you’d get with Auto white balance.

ZOOMING IN CLOSE? A FAST SHUTTER SPEED HELPS

Using a long zoom lens, like a 200mm lens? To help get sharp photos, know that the closer you zoom in, the more any lens movement is exaggerated. Sunny day? Your fast shutter speed will neutralize the movement. But, in the shade, you’ll fall below 1/250 of a second, so you’ll

need to be on a tripod or raise your ISO to raise your shutter speed to at least 1/250.

Rotate Tall or Rotate Image or Both?

When it comes to rotate settings in your camera, there are actually two different ones that do two entirely different things, and knowing which is which can save you a lot of frustration. Rotate Tall (on Nikons, under the Playback menu) means that when you shoot vertical (tall), the camera will rotate the image on the LCD on the back of your camera (that way, you don’t have to turn your camera sideways to see tall images). The other rotate setting is called Rotate Image (under the Setup menu), which means it embeds the orientation of the image right into the file, so when you open it in Lightroom, or Bridge, or Photo Mechanic, etc., it automatically rotates the thumbnails of tall images, so they don’t come in sideways and have to all be manually rotated by you. On Canon cameras, go under the Set-up 1 tab, and choose Auto Rotate. If you choose On with an icon of a camera and computer monitor beside it, it rotates the photo both on the LCD on the back of your camera and your thumbnails

when you import the photos into your computer. If, instead, you choose On with just the computer monitor beside it, then it only rotates the image on your computer (your camera will still show it on its side). If you choose Off, it means there’s no rotation at all—everything stays on its side, on your LCD and on your computer.

Avoid Signs Because They Draw Your Eye

If you’re like me, and you’re worried about things distracting your viewer from the story or subject you want them to see in your photo, keep a sharp eye out for any printed signs or text that might appear in your photos. We’re all mentally programmed to read signs, and unless the sign is the subject of your image, your viewers will automatically start reading the sign, instead of looking at your subject. I learned this tip years ago from Jay Maisel, and I’ve seen it play out time and time again whenever I showed an image with a sign somewhere in it. So, in short, try to compose your shots so signs or text don’t appear in them unless you want them to be the first thing your viewer sees (and reads!).

What People See First in Your Photos

Knowing what your viewer’s eye is going to see first in your photo can really help a lot in composing your shots. Basically, the human eye is drawn to the brightest thing in the image, so if your subject is in the foreground, but behind him is a window with bright sunlight, their eye is going to go there first (not generally what you want). So, knowing that, you can recompose the photo to make sure the brightest thing in the photo is precisely where you want your viewers to look. After the brightest thing, next they look for the sharpest, most in-focus thing, so if there’s a very shallow depth of field, they lock right onto whatever’s in focus (hopefully, your subject). Knowing these two things (where people looking at your photos are going to look first, and then where they’ll look next) can really help you in creating photos where your viewer’s eye goes right where you want it.

Keep from Accidentally Erasing Memory Cards

This is a small tip, but one that can save your hide when you’re out shooting in the field. If you keep spare memory cards in a card holder (and for the sake of your cards, I hope you do), there’s a simple routine the pros use to keep track of which cards are full and which cards are empty and available for quick use. They turn the full cards backward in the case (with the labels facing inward), so they can instantly tell which cards are available for use (the ones with the labels visible) and which ones are full. The next time you’re shooting in a fastpaced environment (like a wedding shoot or a sporting event), you’ll be glad you adopted this system. Also, if your camera uses SD memory cards, there’s a small switch on the cards themselves that keeps them from being erased, or reformatted, or . . . well . . . anything. So, if you know you’ve got a card of shots that you want to protect, just pop the card out, slide the switch to Lock, and you’re set.

HOW TO RESCUE A DAMAGED MEMORY CARD

Memory cards go bad. It happens. So, if the unthinkable happens (you put your memory card into your card reader, and it appears to be blank when you know it’s not), there are downloadable software recovery programs (some free) that do a pretty amazing job, so all is usually not lost. However, if this happens, stop what you’re doing, and start your recovery process immediately for the best chance of getting your images back (don’t put the card back in the camera and keep shooting. Don’t reformat the card. Don’t do anything—just launch your recovery software right away). Some popular memory card rescue programs are PhotoRescue (from DataRescue) and CardRescue (from WinRecovery Software), and you can download free trial versions.

Moving Your Point of Focus

You know how you look through your viewfinder and, in the center, there’s a red circle or a red rectangle? That’s your camera’s autofocus (AF) point, and what that point hits winds up being what’s in focus. Well, something a lot of people don’t realize is that most cameras let you move that focus point up or down, left or right. That way, if you’ve composed a shot where your subject is standing over to the left side of your frame, you can move the AF point over, right on them, so they wind up being perfectly in focus. On Canon cameras, you move your AF point by using the tiny multi-controller joystick on the dial on the back of the camera. On Nikon cameras, you move the AF point by using the multi-selector on the back of the camera. On Sonys, press the down button on the Control Wheel to engage the moving, then use the wheel to reposition the point where you want it.

WHEN IT’S OKAY TO ERASE YOUR MEMORY CARD

There’s a rule a lot of photographers (well, paranoid photographers anyway, like me) follow: we don’t erase our memory cards until we absolutely know that we have two copies of our photos elsewhere. For example, when you download your photos to your computer, that’s only one copy, and you shouldn’t format your memory card with just this one copy (because when your hard drive crashes one day [notice that I said “when”] all those photos are gone forever). Now, once you back up those photos from your computer to a second drive (a backup hard drive), then you’ll have two copies—one set on your computer and one set on your backup drive—and then it’s safe to format (erase) your memory card and keep shooting with that card.

SHUTTER SPEED: 1/200 sec | F-STOP: F/8 | ISO: 100 | FOCAL LENGTH: 70mm

Chapter Eleven

How to Print Like a Pro At the End of the Day, It’s All About the Print There’s something magical that happens when you see one of your prints coming out of a printer. Not an 8x10" mind you—nothing magical happens from an 8x10 print, unless you’re an actor or actress, but then you’re stuck living in L.A., working at the Applebee’s® on Imperial Highway, in between rushing around to auditions and taking night classes at the Speiser/Sturges Acting Studio, and then maybe you get a walk-on part on a sitcom, but it’s not a speaking role, so a few hours later you’re back to saying, “Would you like to start with our spinach and artichoke dip?” Why are you stuck in that rut? Is it your acting skills? Probably. Well, not entirely. More likely it’s because the image from your digital camera won’t fit on an 8x10 without cropping, and if you don’t crop, you’ll have gaps on the top or sides (depending on whether you’re printing tall or wide), so what you really need is an 8x12"-sized print, so it fits without cropping or gaps. But, you don’t have that—you have an 8x10" glossy because you’re an actor/server, and it’s just a vicious cycle. How do you break free from this Groundhog Day type of existence? Make a print in a size that means something. Make a nice, big print, like a 17x22", or maybe even a 24x36", and I promise you, it will change your world forever. You will totally forget about that spinach and artichoke dip appetizer stuff, and before you know it, everything is different. You look out and there are Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, Mark Harmon and J. Lo, and Johnny Depp, and you realize that you’ve moved onto a totally different plane. You’re about to make the big announcement that’s going to make somebody very happy. You look down at the card you were handed, and you announce, “Hanks. Table for five. Your table’s ready,” and then Cindy, the assistant manger, leads them to their table. You see, big prints really do make Hollywood dreams come true.

Make Your Life Easier: Print from Lightroom

The thing that made me first fall in love with Lightroom was how it handled printing all the way around. I had been used to printing from Photoshop (which is way more complicated than it should be), but Lightroom Classic just makes everything so much faster and easier. So, if a friend told me today that they wanted to start making their own prints, the first thing I would tell them is: “You gotta do your printing from Lightroom Classic.” (Note: You have to use Lightroom Classic for this because, at this point in time, cloud-based Lightroom has no way to print whatsoever.) So, for this chapter, I’m going to assume we’re friends (well, you bought my book, so I already like you, and clearly you possess sound judgment and impeccable taste), and I’ll also assume that you took my advice and you’re going to do your printing from Lightroom, which tells me you’ll be happy with your printing experience, and I like happy people, so this new friendship is really off to a great start. We’re not yet at the stage where you can crash on my couch for a few weeks or borrow

money, but we obviously have a lot in common (we both print from Lightroom, for one), and that’s helpful in forming long-term friendships like the one we’re building here.

If Your Prints Come Out Too Dark

The most likely “bad thing” you’ll run into when you make a print is that it’ll come out looking too dark. In fact, you can count it. Why (you may ask)? It’s because when we’re working on editing our images, we’re seeing those images on very bright, backlit monitors. We love the bright screens we have on our laptops and computers, and they are great, but they’re so much brighter than the paper we print to (it’s not backlit and made of shiny glass), so our prints come out much darker than we saw on our bright screens. So, how do we get around this? Luckily, Lightroom has a feature designed to fix this very problem and it’s pretty brilliant in the way it works. Down in the Print Job panel (at the

bottom of the right side Panels area in Lightroom Classic’s Print module), turn on the Print Adjustment checkbox, and right below it, you’ll see a Brightness slider. What’s awesome about this slider is that it makes just your print brighter. It doesn’t change the brightness of your actual image file—just the print you send to the printer. So, using this slider to brighten your image when it hits paper doesn’t mess with your original edited image. How slick is that?! The only question is: “How much brighter should I make it? How far do I drag that Brightness slider to the right?” Here’s what I’d do: Drag it over to +20 and make a test print. Hold that test print beside your computer monitor, with the same image you just printed onscreen, and see if the brightness matches. If it’s still a little too dark, move the Brightness slider to +30 and make another test print (by the way, you don’t have to test prints using big 13x19" sheets of paper—use smaller-sized papers when you’re doing these tests, so you don’t eat up your paper budget in test prints). It’ll take you a couple of test prints to dial in the right Brightness number, but once you know that number, you’ll use it from now on when you’re printing to that printer on that particular paper. No more test prints needed.

What Print Resolution to Use

Here’s another thing that I love about printing in Lightroom: the resolution thing is a no-brainer. That’s good, because this is the type of thing photographers love to argue about endlessly in online photography forums, and I can tell you this, thus far I have not been able to find even two photographers on earth who can agree on what the proper resolution is for making prints. That’s why, instead, I go with what Adobe recommends, which is to let Lightroom handle this decision for you. Let it do all the math behind the scenes, so you don’t have to wrestle with the resolution issue whatsoever. Here’s what you do to have Lightroom do the math for you: Go to Lightroom

Classic’s Print Job panel (in the Print module), and you’ll see a Print Resolution checkbox. Turn that checkbox off. That’s it. Now Lightroom will pick the proper resolution based on the pixel dimensions of the image and the size that you’re printing the image. Just turn that checkbox off and slowly back away from the computer. Now, I know, and you know, that there’s a little voice inside your head telling you that it can’t be that easy, and that maybe you should actually turn that checkbox on, and type some big number into the resolution field (by the way, for some reason, women don’t hear this voice that causes them to go rogue and do things that mess up their prints. It’s a guy thing. We can’t help but mess with stuff, and it usually gets us in trouble, but we don’t learn from this mistake because . . . well . . . we’re guys and like to mess with stuff, and we have a hard time following simple instructions. But, I digress). Anyway, don’t do it. Just turn that checkbox off and rejoice in the fact that you can now take calculating the proper resolution amount off your worry plate. Besides, whatever number you type in that box, there’s a photographer online already waiting to tell you that number is wrong.

Sending Prints to a Photo Lab

If you don’t want to mess with the actual process of buying a printer, setting it up, installing inks, and all that jazz, you can use an online photo lab, who will do everything for you. Even though I own a number of printers, I still use two online labs (sometimes I don’t have the time to print, sometimes I need to print on something I don’t have around, like canvas or metal, or sometimes I need a print bigger than I can make on my own printer). The two I use are Bay Photo Lab (bayphoto.com) and Mpix (mpix.com). Both are outstanding labs, with great quality and absolutely top-flight customer service. You just upload your image to their website, choose the size of the print and the type of paper you want to print on (matte, glossy, metallic, etc.), and they print it and ship it right to you, and they’re darn fast about it. You can still use Lightroom Classic to set up the prints the way you want them (you can use the Print module’s print templates to create some nice multi-photo layouts). Once you have the

page set up how you want it to look, go to the top of the Print Job panel and, from the Print To pop-up menu, choose JPEG File (as shown circled in the inset above). This does two things: (1) when you click the Print to File button at the bottom of the panel, instead of printing your image, it makes a JPEG of the exact layout you set up in the Print module, and (2) it changes your color profile to sRGB, which is the color profile most online labs prefer (I send my prints to Bay Photo and Mpix in sRGB). That’s it. Now, upload your file to your preferred lab and before you know it, your prints will be on their way to you.

How Many Megapixels Do You Need?

There’s a ton of confusion (also known as marketing hype) around megapixels and many people believe that megapixels have to do with image quality—the higher the number of megapixels, the better the quality, right? Unfortunately, that’s not true. So, if you were using that as an excuse to buy a new camera, that’s not going to float with me (although your spouse may buy that line). Here’s what megapixels really mean: how large can I print my final photograph? That’s it. If you’re not going to print anything larger than 8x10", heck, you could get away with a 6-megapixel camera (if they even made cameras with that low a resolution anymore, but back when they did, people still made prints even larger than 8x10" with a 6-megapixel camera, so whatever camera you have already, you can make pretty big prints with it). What are today’s 36megapixel and up cameras for? Suckers. (Okay, not really, but you knew I was going to say that.) Actually, those high-megapixel cameras are for pros who

need to print giant-sized images (think 30x40" and larger), or they need images with super-high resolutions, so they can crop in tight on them (popular with wildlife photographers when your subject is far away or maybe up in the sky) and still have enough resolution to make nice prints. So, if you bought your camera in the past three or four years, you have more than enough resolution to make big prints already, so put away your checkbook. Hey, don’t blame me. I’m trying to save you some money, so you can buy some decent lenses and a fancy tripod. Note: The examples above are native sizes. You can safely upsize any of these to print much larger-sized prints than I listed here.

Do Not Buy an 8x10 Printer

©SCOTT KELBY AND CANON U.S.A., INC.

When it’s time to actually pick which printer to get, there are really only two choices of brands (well, lots of companies make color printers, but the pros only use these two brands): either Canon or Epson. I use Canon printers (they are awesome), but Epson makes great printers, too, so you can’t go wrong with either brand because these have become the standard for pro-level, lab-quality prints. I think what’s more important than the brand you choose (especially since nobody will be able to tell if you made your print on a Canon or an Epson) is that you don’t buy a printer where 8x10" prints are the maximum

size print you can make. The 8x10s are simply not a big enough size for you to fall hopelessly and totally in love with making prints. They’re okay. They’re certainly better than 4x6s, but they’re not great. That’s why I would tell a friend not to buy any printer that won’t print to at least 13x19" prints. That is a size beloved by photographers around the world, and if you put an 8x10" print of your image and a 13x19" side by side on a table, you’d take one look and realize, “I will never print 8x10" again, unless it’s to give to an insurance claims adjuster simply to document damage to my car or home.” Now, as I said, 13x19" is a super-popular size with serious photographers, but if printing is going to be your “thing,” and you can spend a little more, go for a printer that makes 17x22" prints. That’s “hang-it-in-a-gallery” size and, as such, you will become emotionally attached to prints that big. Now, of course, a printer that makes prints that large will not only cost more to purchase initially, but 17x22" paper costs more, and you’ll use more ink as well, so it helps if you’re a Wall Street hedge fund manager, an anesthesiologist, or Jeff Bezos, but once you see prints that size . . . well, there’s just no going back. It’s print heaven!

Printing Lab-Quality 13x19s

©SCOTT KELBY AND CANON U.S.A., INC.

Here’s a killer printer for making that much-beloved 13x19" print, Canon’s PIXMA PRO-100. Its color output is stunning, and if you love black and white, when you see its black-and-white quality, you will lose your mind! Of course, besides 13x19" prints, it also does all of the smaller sizes, and you can print to roll paper, as well (for printing lots of prints on an overnight run—ideal for small studios). It costs around $400, which, for the quality prints it makes, is an absolute bargain.

Printing 17x22s—The Pros’ Paper Size Choice

©SCOTT KELBY, CANON U.S.A., INC, AND EPSON AMERICA INC.

Pros who sell their prints know that the bigger the print, the bigger the paycheck, and maybe that’s why so many choose Canon’s imagePROGRAF PRO-1000 large-print format printer, which makes prints on cut sheets up to 17x22" (or 17" by whatever if you use roll paper). This is one serious color printer and one loved by pro photographers all over the world. If you want to go with Epson, then get their SureColor P800 printer for 17x22" prints (I just checked B&H Photo and they have the P800 for $1,195 and the PRO-1000 for $1,300, which is an insanely low price for a printer of this quality, with this size prints). If you’re ready to go pro, get one of these two awesome printers— you can’t go wrong.

Which Paper Should You Print On?

Choosing which brand and style of paper to use is definitely a personal preference thing, so all I (or anyone) can tell you is what I like best. The first thing I would tell a friend is to not print on glossy paper. It’s really popular with consumers for the snapshots they get printed at Walgreens, but it’s not popular with photographers (you, me, us), who prefer more of a satin or luster finish look in general. There are also certain types of images that we want on fine art, watercolor, or even matte paper, but glossy? Nah, not so much. So, if I had to pick one paper that is pretty flattering across the board for almost every type of image, I would tell you to get a luster paper. You really can’t go wrong with a luster. It’s not glossy, but it’s not matte; it’s kind of right in the middle and it’s super-popular with photographers. Whether you have an Epson or Canon printer, you can find some really nice luster papers out there. Epson’s own luster paper is called “Epson Ultra Premium Photo Paper Luster.” Yes, it’s

probably the clunkiest name for paper ever, but it’s really nice paper. Canon’s own brand of luster is called “Canon Photo Paper Pro Luster.” Again, really nice paper. Of course, there are other paper manufacturers that make luster papers, like Ilford’s Galerie Lustre Photo Duo (nice stuff), or Hahnemühle’s Photo Luster 290 Inkjet Paper. I’m a fan of Hahnemühle papers in general— they have a certain je ne sais quoi (well, they’re a German company, so probably more like das gewisse etwas). Anyway, lots of pros use their paper, so you’ll be in good company. But, honestly, all of these are first-rate luster papers, so you can’t go wrong no matter which of these you choose. Start printing on a luster paper, and then you can branch out to some more exotic paper (see the next page).

What Determines Which Style of Paper?

So, once you’ve printed on a luster paper, and you’re ready to use some specialty papers, how do you know which style of paper to use? Believe it or not, there’s an easy way to know: the paper you choose to print on is determined by the subject matter of your photo. For example, if you’re printing things of a softer nature, like flowers, birds, softer types of portraits (like a bride or a newborn), or any type of image where you want a softer, more artistic feel, try printing on fine art paper. These are either smooth or fiber-textured papers (both fall under the fine art moniker), and they really have a luxurious, art gallery type of look and feel. Also, if you choose a textured or even watercolor style of fine art paper, they’re a bit more forgiving if your image isn’t tack sharp, so it’s a very forgiving media. Also try fine art paper for your blackand-white photography when you want extra texture and depth. For serious portrait work, city life, travel, and landscape shots, try a satin paper (Red River

Paper’s UltraPro Satin is a top choice of pros). Satin is a cousin of luster paper, it looks like photo lab paper, and like luster, everything looks good on it. If your subject has lots of detail (maybe architectural, aviation, automotive, or really detailed landscapes), try printing on metallic paper, or better yet, go all the way to the next level and have your image printed on metal (it’s not a paper at all—your image is actually printed on a thin sheet of metal, but the results look like the difference between regular TV and HDTV). It’s a bit more expensive, yet still quite popular, and with the right image . . . oh man is it saweet. If you want to sell your prints, you want an archival-quality paper that looks and feels luxurious, so check out Epson’s Legacy Platine paper. It’s the real deal. If you print on a Canon, check out Red River’s Palo Duro SoftGloss Rag paper. A little bit of sheen, but less than luster. Again, if you sell your prints, this museum-quality paper is a great choice.

Getting Your Monitor to Match Your Printer

©X-RITE INCORPORATED

You’ll often hear that if you want any hope of having your color images come out in prints that match the colors you see onscreen, you must have your monitor color calibrated. This is partially true. It’s only true if you’re using a Windows PC monitor. There are hundreds of different monitors for a PC, from dozens of different manufacturers, and if you ever stood in a Best Buy store and looked at how different the same image looked on all those different monitors, you’d totally get why you need to calibrate these monitors (it’s your only hope of matching the color in your print to the color on your screen). Luckily, calibrating your monitor has never been easier. First, you’ll need to

buy a hardware calibrator, and two popular ones used by pros are X-Rite’s i1Display Pro (seen above), and Datacolor’s SpyderX. These go right outside your monitor and when you launch their software, they do the rest for you, creating a custom monitor profile based on your make and model. Now, what if you use a Mac? Well, if a friend told me that they use a Mac (iMac, MacBook, something with an Apple monitor), I couldn’t tell them that they absolutely need to buy a calibrator. I know many photographers on Macs who have told me that they (a) haven’t calibrated in months, (b) haven’t calibrated in years, or (c) stopped calibrating altogether because even without it, what they see on their monitor (color-wise, not brightness-wise) is so close to the print that they just stopped messing with it. Apple’s monitors are incredibly consistent, so I get it. I’m not telling you that you don’t need to calibrate if you have an Apple monitor, I’m just saying lots of folks don’t do it anymore and feel like their monitor is within 3% or 4% of being right on the money color-wise. If you become obsessed with printing (and you just might), then even if you have a Mac, you might want to get within 1% or 2%. In that case, go ahead and buy a calibrator, but just know up front, you’re a nerd (just kidding ;-).

Download the Color Profiles for Your Paper

Okay, this is a critical part for getting your prints to come out matching what you see on your screen. You need an ICC color printer profile that tells Lightroom (or Photoshop, if you’re printing from there for some reason) not only what printer you‘re printing to, but on which type of paper. These profiles are so important for getting the kind of results you want, and best of all, most of them are free! So, where do you get these magical ICC color printer profiles? You download them from the manufacturer or online paper source where you bought the paper you’re going to be printing on. For example, if you’re printing on Epson paper, you’d download the free color printer profiles from Epson’s website. If you bought your paper from RedRiverPaper.com, you’d download your free color printer profiles right there from their site. If you’re using Hahnemühle, you’d download their free profiles from their site. Once you download the profile for the paper you print on, you’ll usually just double-click

on it and it’ll install for you, and will now be available for you in Lightroom’s Print Job panel (in the Print module). When you’re ready to print, just choose it from the Profile pop-up menu.

TIP FOR MORE PREDICTABLE COLOR

Your printer has a color management system, and Lightroom has one, too. Having two color management systems going at the same time is a guaranteed recipe for bad color. So, if you’re printing from Lightroom, you should definitely turn off the color management system for your printer (found in your printer’s Print Driver dialog) and use Lightroom’s instead (in other words, let Lightroom determine the right colors).

Sharpening Your Images for Print

This should really be called “Oversharpening Your Images for Print” because that’s pretty much what you do. You lose some of that crisp sharpness you see onscreen during the printing process (the paper is porous to begin with, then the ink spreads when it hits the paper and you get dot gain), so to get around this inherent loss of sharpening, we intentionally oversharpen our images. Here’s what to do: In Lightroom’s Develop module, in the Detail panel, first get the overall sharpening looking good onscreen. Then, start slowly dragging the Amount slider to the right, increasing the amount of sharpening, and as soon as you think, “Ewwww, that’s too sharp,” stop. Don’t backtrack and lower the Amount, just stop. Now, when you’re about to hit the Print button in the Print module, down in the Print Job panel, turn on the Print Sharpening checkbox. Right below that, from the Media Type pop-up menu, choose the style of paper you’re going to be printing on, and lastly, from the Print Sharpening pop-up menu, I generally choose High for the sharpening amount because (say it with

me . . . ) we oversharpen for print. If you do a test print and think it’s too sharp, lower the Print Sharpening amount to Standard and see how that looks. One more thing: you can use this Print Job panel sharpening when you’re saving your file as a JPEG to send to a photo lab, too!

Printing on Canvas

©SCOTT KELBY AND ADOBE STOCK/MARINA_DIKH

I’m going to let you in on a huge secret, one photographers have used for years, and it works miracles when you have an image that isn’t as sharp as you’d like, and you know that when you blow it up to a large size, it’s just not going to look good. The secret is: print it on canvas. It’s the most forgiving media on planet earth, and if your image isn’t right-on-the-money sharp, or on-the-money clean, the texture of a canvas print will be your best friend. It’ll cover lots of photography sins, and you’ll come out looking like a champ. Okay, that’s only part of the secret. The other part is giving canvas prints as gifts. People will totally freak out (in a good way) if you send them one of your images as a canvas print (by the way, when I say “canvas print,” yes, it’s printed on canvas, but that canvas is stretched over a wooden frame, with the image edges wrapped around that frame, or you can request to have the edges solid white or

solid black, usually without any extra cost). You’re probably thinking this is a really expensive proposition, but it can be ridiculously cheap if you buy them from CanvasDiscount.com. I’m not affiliated with them in any way (I’m just a customer). A friend told me to sign up for their email deals, and every few weeks they email me (and you, if you sign up) a list of which sizes are on sale for 90% off. That’s not a misprint. I ordered a 40x30" pano once for just $30.00 (not making this up), and it was only $9.95 for shipping to have that huge print on a wood frame shipped to my client. It’s just nuts. I’m not saying it must be some kind of money laundering scheme, like that Netflix show Ozark, but . . . well . . . I’m just not saying that. Anyway, canvas is incredibly forgiving, it’s inexpensive as all get out, and if you give it as a gift, people will go crazy for it, and for you, so it’s all good. Now, if you need top-quality canvas prints (for client work), then go to ArtisticPhotoCanvas.com. It’s more expensive, but their canvas printing is absolutely top-notch, pro-quality, 100%.

Skip the “Edge-to-Edge” Printing Thing

©SCOTT KELBY AND ADOBE STOCK/UTOI

If you go to your pharmacy’s photo department and have them print images from your trip, they are going to make your prints cover the entire 4x6" print. It’s called “edge-to-edge” printing. Consumers like that (that’s why they do it), but serious photographers know that presentation is everything, which is why we generally don’t print edge to edge (unless we’re printing on canvas). Instead, pros intentionally design their prints so they have a white border around the outside edges, like you see above. If you want your images to look more professional, add a white border around the edges (the wider the border, the more fine art and luxurious the print will look). Skip the edge-to-edge stuff —leave that to your pharmacy’s photo department.

Making Custom Layouts in Lightroom

One of the most awesome features in Lightroom Classic’s Print module is that it comes with a bunch of pre-made print layout templates. Now, about four of them are decent (I used the Fine Art template for the images on page 219). The rest are . . . well . . . let’s just say “they ain’t great.” But, the real fun comes when you start creating, and saving, your own custom layout templates —the one you see above took just two minutes to make. You do this in the Layout panel. You can choose how many images you want in your layout (in this case, I chose nine photos—three rows and three columns), but the nice thing is you see it all fall into place live as you drag the sliders, so you’ll have no problem creating really nice-looking multi-photo layouts using just those sliders. You can also use Lightroom’s Identity Plate option to add some text if you’d like (like I did above). You will get hooked on creating your own templates, doing these multi-photo layouts, and creating more than just a single image on a page. Warning: this stuff is addictive (but in a totally good

way).

WANT TO LEARN EVEN MORE?

Every Wednesday, I host a live, weekly video podcast called The Grid (with photographer Erik Kuna), which is a talk show for photographers. We have great guests on the show (all the biggest names in photography), and you’ll learn a bunch (and, yes, we even talk about printing on some episodes). We stream the live show to my Facebook page at facebook.com/skelby, or you can catch it on YouTube or Twitter or on Apple’s iTunes, as well. We give away cool stuff, we take live questions and comments from our viewers (people watch from literally all over the world), and we have a really great time. Hope you’ll give it a look.

SHUTTER SPEED: 1/125 sec | F-STOP: F/7.1 | ISO: 100 | FOCAL LENGTH: 24mm

Chapter Twelve

Photo Recipes to Help You Get the Shot The Simple Ingredients That Make It All Come Together Well, congratulations, you’ve not only reached the last chapter of the book, but you’ve endured 11 chapter intros to get to this final one, and yet, here you are. Still reading them. Still with me. Still being awesome. You were given fair warning at the very beginning of the book that these introductions would be . . . ahem . . . less than informative about what’s to come, but you hung in there. I super dig you. But what I’m most proud of is that I didn’t let you down. I kept up my end of the bargain by delivering senseless “stream-ofconsciousness style” drivel, and you kept up your end by reading them (even though I tried to wave you off several times, you stuck around). So, I’d like to spend the rest of the time we have here together talking about you, and of course, by “you” I mean me. I mean, I could waste the rest of the space on this page telling you about the photo recipes to come in this chapter, but it’s a visual thing really. Well, it’s a visual thing with a bunch of words describing the visual thing, and I must admit, I wondered several times if it was even worth adding that text. Maybe I should’ve just put a picture there and let it just kind of hang there on its own, challenging you to figure out the settings and lighting and stuff like that, but then I wouldn’t be able to call this chapter “Photo Recipes.” Instead, I would have to call it just “Photo.” By the way, I’ve done this photo recipes thing in a number of my books, and some folks have told me they thought it was cute using the terms “recipes” and “ingredients” for how to “cook up” great photos, and I felt bad when I had to tell them, in reality, the term “recipes” is actually an acronym that stands for “Reflective Exposure Compensation Imaging Parallax Editing Server.” Aw, heck, even I can’t pull that one off with a straight face. Look, I won’t get another chance to thank you for taking the time to read these intros, and the book itself, so all kidding aside, I hope it helps you make the best photos you’ve ever made. Here’s wishing you great success on your photographic journey, and I’ll be cheering

you on from the sidelines, and that is actually, finally, the truth.

The Recipe for Getting This Type of Shot

Characteristics of this type of shot: A Milky Way shot with foreground detail, in this case, in Monument Valley, Utah. (1) For this to work, you need zero light pollution—you have to shoot a moonless, cloudless, clear night sky hours away from any city lights. To capture the nighttime sky like this, you need to be on a tripod, and I would recommend a wide- or super-wide-angle lens (I used a 14mm super-wide for the shot above)—the faster the lens the better because those stars aren’t nearly as bright as they appear (to be fair, they are far away). (2) Here’s a recipe that works really well for Milky Way shots: Shoot in manual mode, at the lowest-numbered f-stop your lens will allow (here, it was f/2.8). Set your shutter speed to 15 seconds—you might be able to go as long as 30 seconds, maybe, but if you go too long, your stars will be blurry because of the rotation of the earth (so, between 15–20 seconds should about do it). This is

why we can’t simply make a longer exposure. Instead, to get the stars brighter, we have to really crank up the ISO (I was at 3,200 for this shot). But, don’t worry, you can get away with it for Milky Way shots like this because you won’t see the noise like you normally would. Cranking up the ISO when we’re on a tripod goes against everything I’ve previously talked about in this book, but this is the one time we break that rule. (3) You can use the PhotoPills app (see page 59) to tell you exactly where the Milky Way will appear in the sky to help you get set up in the right position. To focus your shot, set your focus to Infinity on the lens (see page 32), or if your camera has a Focus Peaking feature, turn that on and use Live View on the back of your camera to get your stars in sharp focus using Manual focus on your lens. To light some of the foreground, light paint using a small LED flashlight—just move it quickly back and forth over the foreground for a few seconds (it takes a little trial and error to find out exactly how long you should do this, but you’ll get it quickly).

The Recipe for Getting This Type of Shot

Characteristics of this type of shot: An epic-style interior shot, with a view from the floor to the ceiling, without it being packed with tourists. (1) There are two big keys to a shot like this: The first is using a super-wideangle lens, like a 14mm or 16mm on a full-frame body, or a 10mm or 12mm on a crop-sensor body. It’s the super-wide that gives the image its epic feel. A super-wide-angle pushes the scene you’re aiming at away from you, making it appear larger than it actually is, which is where a lot of the epic feel comes from. A super-wide is also what lets you have a view that lets you capture all the way from the floor to the ceiling in one frame. (2) The second key technique to get an epic feel is to shoot way down low. In this case, I’m shooting from a really low perspective, just a few inches above the floor, with my camera and ballhead mounted on a Platypod (see page 79), which not only accentuates the foreground (very important in a shot like this),

but also makes the floor appear more reflective. Perhaps even more important is that the lighting is lower than it appears, and I wouldn’t be able to handhold and get a sharp shot without raising my ISO a lot. (3) This is the beautiful Teatro la Fenice opera house in Venice, Italy. I’m positioned in the center of the aisle, and because the perspective is so low, you don’t see all of the tourists from a tour group who are sitting in the seats on the left (actually, if you look closely, you’ll see one on the aisle, on the left, back a few rows). (4) To be able to keep the detail in the lights, without them blowing out, I shot bracketed on my camera (so three shots total; see page 175) and combined them into a single image in Lightroom. This was shot in aperture priority mode at f/11 at 100 ISO.

The Recipe for Getting This Type of Shot

Characteristics of this type of shot: A soft, misty landscape, with lots of depth and dimension. These are the famous Dark Hedges, about 50 minutes outside of Belfast, Northern Ireland. (1) To get a shot where you have that lovely atmospheric haze and fog, you’ve got to get there first thing in the morning before the fog has a chance to burn off. A bit of luck doesn’t hurt either because it’s not always going to be foggy, even if you do get up and get in shooting position before dawn. (2) When I got to this location, I assumed it would be a wide-angle shot, so I started shooting with my 16–35mm lens at 16mm, but it just didn’t look right (well, it didn’t look anything like the shots I had seen that made me want to get up so early and drive out there). I stopped shooting and pulled out my phone to pull up some images (thank you, Google) to see what I was doing wrong. I immediately saw what the issue was. My super-wide-angle was pulling

in way too much of the area outside the line of trees. It needed the compression of a long lens. As soon as I put my 70–200mm lens on and zoomed in a bit, it now looked like I was hoping it would. For the image you see above, I’m zoomed in to 135mm. (3) Compositionally, with the road leading the viewer’s eyes right down the path, you already have a built-in leading line, so the composition was easy—I just set my camera up on a tripod, right in the center of the road. I focused about 1/3 of the way into the image, and to keep as much as possible in focus, I shot in aperture priority mode at f/11. My ISO was 100 (for the cleanest possible shot), and my shutter speed wound up being 1/50 of a second. I darkened the outside edges of the image in Lightroom’s Develop module, using its Post-Crop Vignetting feature (in the Effects panels) and dragging the Amount slider to the left.

The Recipe for Getting This Type of Shot

Characteristics of this type of shot: A nighttime city shot, and even though it’s well after sunset, the sky is still blue. This is the famous Atlas statue in New York City’s Rockefeller Center. (1) You’re shooting at night, so generally, you’re going to be shooting on a tripod since your shutter will have to stay open for a while. I set up my camera on a tripod, but the security guard at the scene stopped me from using it (such is the case when using a tripod these days. If there’s a security guard anywhere nearby, you two are going to have a chat). I was able to take a few shots with my tripod, but I was essentially standing in the street far away, so the composition didn’t look very dynamic. To get this type of epic-style shot, I had to hand-hold, which meant I had to shoot at a crazy high ISO. (2) The thing that makes this look kind of epic is the same thing that made the shot of the opera house in Venice (on page 229) have that type of look, and

that is I’m using a super-wide-angle lens and I’m shooting from down low. Luckily, the statue is fairly tall, so I was able to stand and take the shot, but I had to crank my ISO (on my Canon 5D Mark IV) up to 12,800—something I rarely do because of the noise. But, even at that high an ISO (and my f-stop set down to f/5.6), I could still only get my shutter speed to 1/50 of a second, so I had to keep really still while taking the shot. I did not use any noise reduction. If you get a proper exposure and don’t have to make the shot brighter in postproduction, you can often get away with ISOs you wouldn’t normally dream of. Just remember: If you print it at a huge size, you’ll see lots of noise. If you print it at a smaller size (like you see here) or share it on Instagram, you won’t see a lot of noise. (3) The reason the sky is blue is because I shot this at blue hour (see page 47), which is that short 15-minute-or-so window where the night sky goes from blue to black.

The Recipe for Getting This Type of Shot

Characteristics of this type of shot: A sweeping landscape shot with a colorful sky, with layers that lead you into the image. This was taken from an overlook (tourist area, no hiking involved) at the Reynisfjara Black Sand Beach just outside the town of Vik, Iceland. (1) You already know that great landscape shots happen in great light, and that light only happens twice a day, and this is one of them—this shot was taken right around sunrise. To get this type of shot, you have to get up and get in place, ready to shoot, around 30 minutes before sunrise. (2) You’re shooting in a low-light situation around dawn, so you’ll need to be on a tripod. This was shot in aperture priority mode at f/11, ISO 100, and the camera chose a shutter speed for me of 1/30 of a second. I focused 1/3 of the way into the image, so around that sea stack on the left. This was shot with a 14mm super-wide-angle lens. Compositionally, I made sure to include some

grass on the right side of the image as more of a foreground object to help lead the viewer into the shot. I would have liked to have had a little more. (3) The key technique here is luck. We simply got lucky that on the morning we were in Vik and that we got up early, Mother Nature gave us an incredible cloud-filled sky to hold all that sunrise color. Without that cloudy sky, this shot wouldn’t have made it into the book. You can do everything right—show up early, have the right lens, remember your cable release, get set up and ready to shoot well before dawn—but if those clouds don’t show up, it’s going to look “blah.” That’s how critical clouds are to the success of a landscape shot, and sadly, it’s the part we have the least control over. That’s why when you can shoot at the same location over multiple days, your chances for success go up that one of those days you might be blessed with an incredible sky.

The Recipe for Getting This Type of Shot

Characteristics of this type of shot: A timeless look at a tourist-free street, with soft, even lighting, and minimum distractions. This was taken in Lisbon, Portugal, at Calçada de São Francisco 6 (thank you, Google maps). (1) This image has a timeless quality to it because there’s really nothing in it that time stamps it from being from a particular decade. This could’ve been taken 50 or 60 years ago, and nobody would know (I left the round red Coca Cola logo on the front of the trolley, since they’ve been around since prehistoric times and it hasn’t changed since). To help with the timeless look, I did two things in Photoshop, one minor, one major: The minor one was I removed some graffiti on the walls that kind of killed the timelessness of the image. The major one was I removed all the overhead cable lines. When I was standing there taking the shot, I didn’t even notice them. But, when I opened the image on my computer, it looked like I should have titled the shot, “Overhead Wires.”

So, I removed them using the Clone Stamp tool and the Healing Brush tool. (2) To have that nice, soft light, you have to be in place, ready to shoot, as soon as the cable cars start running in the morning. Thirty minutes later, the light is harsh, tourists are now walking into your frame, and modern cars are stacking up behind the trolley, all killing the timelessness. In the morning, there are no tourists and few cars. (3) This was taken hand-held in aperture priority mode. The light was low at that time of the morning, so I shot at f/2.8 to let as much light in as possible. But, even at f/2.8, I had to bump the ISO up to 800 to get a shutter speed of 1/25 of a second, which is lower than I’d normally like for a hand-held shot, but I leaned against a wall to help stabilize myself and the camera. Shot using a 70–200mm lens at 70mm. Also note the rule of thirds composition (see page 46).

The Recipe for Getting This Type of Shot

Characteristics of this type of shot: A natural light portrait with soft, beautiful, directional light. (1) This is a window light shot, with the subject and the photographer both positioned parallel to the window so you get nice shadows on the subject’s face. I had her turn her head toward the window a bit, so we don’t have “split lighting” (where one side of her face is lit and the other side is fully in shadows). By turning her head toward the window, you get some of that window light on the side of her face closest to the camera. In this particular shot, our subject is looking down, but you can have your subject keep their head in that position, and yet have their eyes looking back at the camera. (2) In this case, it wasn’t just overcast outside, it was raining as well, so the light from the window was already very soft. That’s not usually the case, so normally, I have my subject sit 6 to 8 feet away from the window, or even

behind it a bit, so the light isn’t as harsh. But, in this case, the light was so low because of the cloud cover and rain that I had to move my subject quite close to the window (maybe only 2 feet from it) to get enough light to handhold the shot. (3) I’m shooting with an 85mm f/1.8 lens, so I could get the background really soft and out of focus. I’m in aperture priority mode at f/1.8, ISO 100, handholding, and my camera chose a shutter speed for me of 1/160 of a second (more than enough speed to hand-hold the shot and get it sharp and crisp). I composed the shot first, then moved my focus point right over my subject’s eye closest the camera, and then I took the shot. (4) To get a more flattering look, I’m shooting into the “short side” (shadow side) of her face.

The Recipe for Getting This Type of Shot

Characteristics of this type of shot: A city skyline along a river, but with soft, silky water and a brown tint to the image. (1) Cloudy days help to give you a soft, even light for a shot like this, taken from Empire Fulton Ferry park, Water Street, Brooklyn. (2) The key to this shot is the soft, silky water, which comes from doing a long exposure (see page 58), and to get a long enough exposure to make the choppy water in the river look silky, you’re going to need an ND (neutral density) filter. In this case, I’m using a 10-stop ND, so I can get a really long exposure. On a bright, sunny day, you might need more than a 10-stop; you might need to stack two filters on top of each other (like a 10-stop, with a 3-stop on top of it) to get a long enough exposure, but since it was quite cloudy and overcast, I was able to get away with just a 10-stop.

(3) This was taken in aperture priority mode, at f/11, 100 ISO, and with that 10-stop ND filter over the end of my lens, my camera kept my shutter open for 59 seconds—more than enough to get that smooth, silky water. For an exposure that long, you will definitely need to be shooting on a tripod. (4) The brownish tint you see over the image was not added in Photoshop or Lightroom. That tint is inherent in the actual ND filter I was using. It’s from B+W (a German filter manufacturer) and that filter gives everything you shoot with it a brownish tint. If you like that tint, it’s awesome. If you don’t, you can convert your images to black and white to get rid of the tint, or you can color correct it in Photoshop or Lightroom.

The Recipe for Getting This Type of Shot

Characteristics of this type of shot: A single flower shot on a soft, blurry background in nice light with water droplets. Taken in the Princess Grace Rose Garden in the Fontvieille district of Monaco. (1) This shot is part technique, part camera settings, and part luck. It starts with shooting with a lens that lets you zoom in nice and close to the flower, which helps put the background out of focus. This is so important because it creates that separation from the background. This was taken in a garden full of flowers and if you see a bunch of other roses in the background, it just all blends together, so you want that separation. This was taken with a Tamron 28–300mm f/3.5–6.3 lens zoomed in to 236mm. (2) It was shot hand-held in aperture priority mode at f/6.3 (that was as fast an f-stop as my lens would let me choose zoomed into 236mm). So, how is the background so nice and soft and out of focus? It’s because (like I mentioned

back on page 174), the zooming-in-tight part is actually more important than the f-stop when it comes to making a blurry background. My ISO is set at 400 (higher than it needed to be), at 1/500th of a second (see? I probably could have lowered the ISO to 100 and still had a fast enough shutter speed for hand-holding—200 ISO tops). (3) There are actually three other things, besides lens and camera settings, that you’ll need to make this type of shot: One is angle. I’m down low, shooting at the flower’s height, not shooting down on it (see page 168). The second thing is the light is soft, beautiful, and even, even though it’s the middle of the day. How is that? That’s the third thing. It was raining that day, so in between the rain showers, we’d duck out of an overhang we were hiding under to stay dry and start shooting. I had rain drops on the flower, and nice, soft overcast light to shoot in until it started raining again. So, I guess you could say the third thing was luck.

The Recipe for Getting This Type of Shot

Characteristics of this type of shot: An indoor shot lit with flash, with strong shadows, against a neutral gray background. (1) This is a simple, one-light shot with the flash (in a softbox, so the light is soft and flattering) positioned to the left of the subject, up about a foot higher than her head and tilted back down toward her. You can see the position of the flash reflected in her irises here. (2) I generally position the light at a 45° angle to the subject, but in this case, with the strong shadows on the side of her face opposite the light, it’s more like 50° or 55° (so it’s more to her side than normal). (3) By shooting her on a roll of light gray seamless paper like this, it makes it easy to either add a texture to that background (using Photoshop) or remove her from it and put her on a different background (gray is the easiest color for

Photoshop to remove someone from the background while keeping all their hair intact). (4) This was taken using a 70–200mm f/2.8 lens at 125mm. I shot in manual mode (when using flash, you need to be able to set the shutter speed manually, rather than having the camera do it for you like it does when you shoot in aperture priority mode), so I set my shutter speed at my standard 1/125 of a second for flash. Shot at f/8 at 100 ISO. Why f/8? At some point, I probably accidentally moved my aperture dial off my usual f/5.6. It happens.

The Recipe for Getting This Type of Shot

Characteristics of this type of shot: Aviation shot of a fighter jet on climb out, usually taken during an air show. (1) If you’re shooting a jet, rather than a prop-driven plane, the process is really pretty easy because all you have to do is freeze the motion of the jet and get every little detail. So, we shoot in aperture priority with a small numbered f-stop (something like f/4), and if we’re shooting on a sunny day, we’ll have well over the 1/1000 of a second minimum shutter speed we need. In fact, you’ll probably be at more like 1/4000 of a second, which is great! (2) To keep from having to crop in too much in post-production, it helps to have a long lens, like a 100–400mm or something in that range (this was shot with that very lens, out at 400mm). A 300mm is a popular lens for aviation photographers, and you don’t need a heavy f/2.8—you can get away with a 300mm f/4, which is way cheaper, smaller, and lighter, and you can shoot at

f/4 if you need the shutter speed (it’s a cloudy day), or you can even go higher to f/5.6 or f/8 if your shutter speed doesn’t fall below 1/1000 of a second. Also, this is a hand-held scenario all the way, so don’t use a tripod or monopod. If your lens has built-in image stabilization, turn it off (that’s for lowlight shooting. The IS or VR often won’t keep up with the fast panning you’ll be doing as the jets go zipping by, and you’ll wind up with a lot of out-of-focus shots that otherwise would have been sharp)! (3) These are fast moving objects, so you’ll want to turn on Continuous Focus mode (or AI Servo, if that’s what your camera calls it) to track along with the jet’s current path. You’ll also want to shoot in Burst mode, taking lots of shots as you track along with the jet, and keep shooting for a second or so after the jet passes.

The Recipe for Getting This Type of Shot

Characteristics of this type of shot: Very soft lighting on a textured background, and the key ingredient is the softness and subtlety of the light. (1) This is a one-light shot, and the light is positioned for the maximum amount of softness, so of course, we’re using a softbox. The bigger the softbox, the softer the light, so use the largest softbox you can (you can get huge softboxes for your flash, no problem. You can also use a large 7’ parabolic umbrella—check out the shoot-through models from FJ Westcott. They’re surprisingly inexpensive for that large a diffuser). (2) To get that super-soft light, there are a couple of different techniques you can use: The first one is to get the light as close as you can to the subject without it actually being seen in the frame. Here, the front of the softbox is literally just inches from the edge of the left side of the image, as close as I could get it without it being seen in the shot. When you get the light close like

this, of course it gets very bright, so be ready to lower the brightness of your flash quite a bit. (3) The second technique is called “feathering” the light, so your subject doesn’t have the light centered on them (the center is where the hardest light will be). Instead, the light is parallel to your subject (not at a 45° angle, like usual). Once it’s directly beside them, slide the light forward toward your camera position, so just the back edge of your softbox is actually lighting your subject—that’s where the softbox’s most flattering light can be found. Also, to give the background more interest, in Photoshop, I added a texture over the solid-gray seamless paper background. Yes, I made a video for you (you’ll find it on the book’s companion webpage, mentioned on page 3). (4) Lastly, notice the composition. There’s lots of negative space on the right, which leads your eye to the subject and makes for a more interesting, dynamic composition.

The Recipe for Getting This Type of Shot

Characteristics of this type of shot: A single frame of a sports arena that pretty much takes it all in without doing a panorama or multi-stitched shot. This is AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, home of the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys. (1) This is a domed stadium, with the center open to light the field with natural light. But, of course, the opening in the dome is over the field, so that’s where it’s the brightest. It’s not nearly as bright from the stands where I’m shooting or the seats surrounding the field, so I’m shooting on a tripod. (2) The look of this shot comes from using an 8–15mm fisheye lens, out at 14mm. This is a go-to lens when you want to capture everything in one frame like this. It’s great for sporting venue shots, cathedrals, palaces, and modern building interiors, as well. A fisheye gives a unique look to any image because of the way the lens is designed. Even out at 15mm, it gives you a wider, more rounded view than a 14mm super-wide-angle lens, which doesn’t have that

characteristic round look like a fisheye has. To limit the amount of distortion (rounding) the lens creates, you can shoot straight on, with the lens aiming flat at the scene in front of you. To exaggerate the rounding, look through the viewfinder as you tip your camera up or down, and it really starts to stretch things in an interesting way. There’s no right or wrong way to do this, so it’s up to your creative choice which way looks best to you. (3) This was shot (incorrectly, I might add) at f/7.1, 800 ISO, and at 1/100 of a second. What should the settings have been? Ideally, I would have chosen f/11, at 100 ISO, and at whatever shutter speed my camera chose to create a proper exposure. So why didn’t I use those settings? I had been hand-holding, and when I put my camera on my tripod, I forgot to recheck my settings. I got lucky, and the shot is okay, but it would have been sharper and cleaner had I used the right settings.

The Recipe for Getting This Type of Shot

Characteristics of this type of shot: A sweeping landscape, with a mirror-like reflection. (1) To get the good light, you have to be up early. This was taken just a little after sunrise. Normally, about 10 or 15 minutes after sunrise, the sun is high enough in the sky that the light turns really bright, harsh, and awful. But, in this case, it was a very overcast, cloud-filled day, so we were able to shoot a little bit longer. (2) To get a mirror-like reflection, you generally have to be up and shooting around dawn. About an hour or so later, it’s too late—the winds pick up, the water gets choppy, and your reflection is gone. We were there early enough to where the winds hadn’t picked up yet, so I got a perfect, glassy reflection on the pond.

(3) The small pond in the scene looks like a big lake because my camera is really low to the ground on a Platypod. The sun is up at this point, so the light isn’t so low that I couldn’t just hand-hold the shot, so I’m just using it to get that low angle, which makes the scene look bigger and more epic and accentuates that all-important foreground of snow right in front. By having that snow in the foreground, it helps build layers into your composition that give your shot more depth and dimension (see page 45). (4) Since you’ll be on a tripod (or, in my case, a Platypod), you can shoot at the lowest native ISO for your camera (for my camera, that’s 100 ISO). The rest of the settings are textbook as well: it’s a landscape shot, so f/11, shot in aperture priority mode, and my camera set the shutter speed for me at 1/200 of a second. At that shutter speed, I could have hand-held no problem, but like I said, I was on a Platypod more for the low angle rather than holding the camera still.

The Recipe for Getting This Type of Shot

Characteristics of this type of shot: A location portrait taken outdoors with a flash. (1) To get this look, you’re shooting late in the day, between one hour to 30 minutes before sunset. You’re only going to use one flash, so your second light source will be the sun. If you position your subject with their back toward the sun, like you see above, it will light the back of your subject’s hair, which helps give you a little more visual separation from the background, and your light just looks more interesting. (2) For the white light from the flash to match the light of the late-day sun, you’ll need to put at least one small piece of gel over the front of your flash, so the light sources match (you don’t want nice, warm, yellow light on your subject’s hair, and then white light on their face; see page 121). You might even need to add a second piece, so it looks warm enough to match the rest of

the scene. If at any time the light from your flash starts to look white, it’s time to tape on yet another piece of gel. (3) You’ll want to use a softbox, so your light is soft and flattering. In this case, I’m using a Westcott Rapid Box 26" Octa, mounted on the end of an Impact QuickStik Telescopic Handle (it’s around $29 from B&H Photo. Cheap). It does take a friend or assistant to hold the pole with the flash and softbox mounted on it, but luckily, it’s not too heavy. Position it at a 45° angle to your subject, up about a foot higher than their head, and tilt it down slightly at them. (4) You’ll want to shoot in manual mode, with the ISO at 100, your shutter speed at 1/125 of a second, and start with your f-stop at f/5.6. Set your flash to Manual mode (not TTL), set your flash power to 1/4 power, and take a test shot. If the flash is too bright, just lower its power until it looks natural with the existing light where you’re shooting. Shoot with a portrait lens (this was taken with a 70–200mm) and zoom in to make the background out of focus (I was zoomed in to 140mm for this shot).

The Recipe for Getting This Type of Shot

Characteristics of this type of shot: Sports action photo, freezing the motion and keeping the athlete in focus, while the background is soft and out of focus. (1) To get a tight-in shot like this, you’ll need a very long lens—ideally, a 400mm f/2.8 lens or a 300mm lens, with a 1.4x teleconverter to get you in closer. (If this seems like a crazy-expensive proposition, turn back to the sports chapter for a refresher.) (2) To get the out-of-focus background (which you want, as it creates separation of the player from the background), you need to shoot at the widest possible aperture your lens will allow (meaning, shoot at the lowest number your lens will go—ideally, f/2.8, but if your lens won’t go that low, then f/4. If your lens will only go down to f/5.6, you’re not going to get the type of out-offocus background and separation you see here, which is why these fast lenses —ones that shoot at f/2.8 or f/4—are ideal for sports). During a game, I shoot

in aperture priority mode and I won’t change the f-stop even once—it will always be f/2.8 (and the camera will pick the shutter speed for me). (3) Your shutter speed needs to be at least 1/1000 of a second or faster to freeze action in sports. During a daylight game like this, with you shooting at f/2.8, it will not be a problem (you’ll probably see shutter speeds more like 1/4000 or higher). However, if part of the field winds up in shadow later in the day, you might have to raise your ISO to get your shutter speed back up to 1/1000 of a second. Also consider shooting using Auto ISO (see page 156). (4) Lastly, to shoot a moving athlete and not lose the focus as much, switch your camera to AI Servo mode (Canon) or Continuous Focus mode (Nikon and Sony). That way, the focus tracks and moves with your athlete as he/she moves during the action.

The Recipe for Getting This Type of Shot

Characteristics of this type of shot: A food shot, cropping in tight with lots of detail, while the background falls off to being out-of-focus very quickly. (1) The first step to a shot like this happens before you’re seated at your table. Ask to either be seated outside (if possible) or near a window. The reason is the challenge of shooting food—you need light. Nice, natural light looks wonderful for food shots, so if you can sit near a window, or outside, you’re halfway there. However, to keep the plates looking white (instead of tinted blue), make sure you change your camera’s white balance to Cloudy or Shade (try both to see which one looks better). (2) The other key to great-looking food shots is to zoom in really tight on the food. For example, if you have an 18–200mm lens, zoom all the way in to 200mm. Don’t try to show the whole plate, just show part of it. To do this, you’ll probably have to stand up behind your chair for a moment, then shoot

from a little lower angle (don’t stand up straight and shoot down on your food —crouch down to lower your angle). (3) To get the soft, out-of-focus background, shoot in aperture priority mode at the lowest number f-stop your lens will allow (in this case, it was only f/5.6, but because I was zoomed in so tight, it still creates that out-of-focus background). If my lens would have gone to f/4 or f/2.8, I could have made it even more shallow and out-of-focus. (4) To create some energy in food shots like this, I normally tilt the camera to the right or to the left (as seen here).

The Recipe for Getting This Type of Shot

Characteristics of this type of shot: An on-location travel shot, with great light, great color, and a timeless look. (1) I didn’t just walk up to this scene in Rome where a woman was dressed in 1940s-style clothing, puffing on a cigarette, on a classic old Vespa scooter, with no tourists anywhere around and great light. A lot of planning went into this shot beforehand, but once the up-front planning was done, the shoot itself took only minutes. (2) To get a shot like this, hire a local model. We found our model on Facebook (see page 72), told her my vision for the shot (the 1940s look), and she volunteered to get the wardrobe on her own, which was awesome. Then, we searched Google for an old Vespa and found an online rental place in Rome (I think it was $60 for the day). Once your model arrives and you see the colors of her outfit, you can look for either an area with contrasting colors to her

outfit, or similar complementary colors (in our case, we found an alley nearby with complementary colors [luck], away from all the tourists, and more importantly, not in direct daylight—though we did have a 1-stop diffuser with us just in case. I would recommend carrying one with you). (3) I shot in aperture priority mode at f/4, so the background might be a little out of focus. But, I wanted to use a lens that would take in a lot of the background, so I shot at 105mm, at 200 ISO, so my camera gave me a shutter speed of 1/100 of a second. It’s a little slower than I like for hand-held, so I was particularly careful to keep my camera still while taking the shots. I had her look up in this shot to get a little more light on her face. Sometimes you have to “make” the shot, which is what I did here, but once the planning phase is over, the shoot happens pretty quickly.

Join us on social!@rocky_nook