While covering an editorial assignment last week, I had very little time to photograph Master Sommelier Gerard Basset at his hotel.  We needed a simple but classy looking portrait to feature in Lloyds magazine.

So,  because of the limited amount of time and the lack of a studio I had to improvise.  Easy right?

I brought along a piece of A1 black card, which I had my assistant to hold, placed behind a chair where Gerard was to sit. Right behind the chair I placed a strobe with a red gel pointing up at the card behind Gerard’s head. As for the main light, I had a strobe firing through a shoot through umbrella positioned 45 degrees off to the right. This all took less than one minute to set up.

Now who said you need  a 20×20ft backdrop and half a day?

I resurrected an old hard drive and found a few more photos of my work done in the past. I thought it would be good to post it.

Drawing of rock climber and portrait of a woman. Actually it was modified. Per request, I moved the hand.

And airbrushed Tiger cubs. This was done with Createx paints on bristol.

Venture
Lytham St. Annes
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t/ 01253 726 801

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…die ihre Portrait-Fotos in sämlichen Communities mit dem Spruch “Das bin ich!” beschriften.

When working with portraits, we oftenly need to erase background of an object such as
erase background from haired picture and then change the background into something else.

I have a technique for doing this, and I have been using it since 2005. That year, I work for photograph studio in Makassar, Indonesia,
found that the most of photographs’ background must be changed into landscapes, abstracts, or others. By reading on internet, I knew best way
to do this was by using white screen (we used thick white paper) as studio background, and gave enough light to obtain really white screen.

When imported and edited within Photoshop, I used “multiply technique” – I don’t know how has named it, but it really uses multiply blending to work.

Let’s see how it works:
1. Open an image – portraits should give better result.

2. Retune colors until the background become white and skintone become natural.

3. Double click layer Background (it should be the only layer). Name it object, click OK.

4. Right click the layer “object” and duplicate it. Now we have two layers, “object” and “object copy”.

5. Change the lower layer, the “object” layer’s blending mode to Multiply.

6. Add a picture and make it the bottom-most layer, which will be the new background.
7. Select the top-most layer and apply layer mask to this layer.

8. We can now start to erase the background of the top-most layer (in masking mode). Don’t erase white object other than background.
9. See detailed at red-marked parts. We can use layer-mask, black forecolor and white backcolor, then use brush tool to paint around the hair.

10. As you can see, this method works perfectly

For your notice, this technique works good on white down to light-gray canvas, but not various-colored canvas. Other time, we will discuss other techniques
for other cases. Keep reading

In Understanding Shooting Modes (Part-I, II and III) I explained some of the auto and advanced modes. I’ll explain other available modes like Portrait, Landscape, Sports, Macro, and Night in this part.

Other Modes

In today’s cameras many other modes exist which I will be briefing out below. Availability and indication of these modes depends upon brand to brand. These modes are basically preprogrammed modes provided by your camera manufacturer.

 Portrait Mode

This mode is mostly represented by a head-and-shoulders icon. It creates a shallow depth-of-field thus throws out the distracting background. Turn the dial to use this mode and your camera will take care of everything else.

 Landscape Mode

This mode is mostly represented by a mountain icon. It produces a maximum depth-of-field allowing lens to capture everything….

In Understanding Shooting Modes (Part-I and Part-II) I explained Auto, Programmed and Aperture Priority Mode, I’ll explain and illustrate one of the other advanced modes called Shutter Priority Mode in this part.

Shutter Priority Mode

This mode lets you choose the shutter speed and the camera chooses the appropriate aperture (lens opening) for proper exposure.

Why to use Shutter Priority Mode?

Shutter priority will allow you to control how you capture your subject in motion. This mode is used when you want to increase or decrease the amount of blurring in the picture, the blurring is due to the motion of either the subject or the camera shake.

Try It

Visit some waterfall and experiment the following:

Slow Shutter Speed

1. Mount the camera on a stable tripod.
2. Turn your camera’s exposure mode dial to Shutter Priority.
3. Lower down the shutter speed to 1 Sec (or any thing above 1 Sec).
4. Focus the waterfall and press shutter release button.

Result Cameras shutter will allow light to fall on the sensor for….

In continuation to Understanding Shooting Modes (Part-I) where I described the Auto and Programmed Modes, I’ll explain and illustrate one of the advanced modes called Aperture Priority Mode in this part.

Aperture Priority Mode

This mode lets you choose the aperture (lens opening) and the camera chooses the appropriate shutter speed for proper exposure.

Just like human’s eyes, lens of a camera has an opening called iris that opens and closes according to automatic or manual settings. This in optical terms also referred as “Aperture”. Changing the aperture settings changes the size of the opening which controls the amount of light the lens passes through to the image sensor.

Why to use Aperture Priority Mode?

This mode is used when you want to have control over depth-of-field. This is measured in f-stops i.e. f/1.4, f/1.8, etc. Higher f-stop numbers indicate smaller aperture and vice-versa.

The “f-number” is the ratio of distance from the sensor/ film to the optical center of the lens in your camera. When you buy a lens for your camera, it will have a number on it, something like 18mm, 55mm, 105mm, etc. These numbers are called as focal length.

To put all of this simple, when the aperture of a 200mm lens (focal length) is 50 mm (aperture opening) wide, your f-stop will be f/4, because the ratio of 200/50 equals four. If you “stop down” your aperture to half that size – 25 mm wide – your f-stop will be f/8. (200 divided by 25.) So the “f-number” gets larger as you let in less light.

Today’s advance digital cameras basically perform automatically many of the tasks necessary for capturing a photo. The Auto mode or the Programmed mode is always a good option for beginners to shoot any scene. However, these modes don’t always produce up to the mark results. If you really want to utilize the power of your DSLR, you must learn and practice all the available modes.

Before discussing any of the available modes, we should understand exposure. Exposure is basically amount of light allowed to fall on photographic film (in case of a film SLR) or on image sensor (in case of a DSLR). The amount of light in a camera is controlled by setting the combination of Aperture and Shutter.

Auto (Point-and-Shoot) Mode

In Auto mode, it’s the camera that makes decision on what amount of light is allowed to fall on the sensor. Today’s digital cameras are intelligent enough to run their own algorithms to attain a best calculated aperture and shutter speed combination based on the projected scene. You don’t have to do anything more than to press the shutter release button. This method is also referred to as the “Point-and-shoot mode”.

ISO Overview

In traditional film photography terms ISO indicates sensitivity of a photographic negative film to light. It is measured in numbers i.e. 200, 400, 800, etc. The lower numbers indicate lower sensitivity of the film with finer quality in the pictures.

In Digital Photography terms ISO indicates sensitivity of the image sensor to light. The concept remains the same i.e. lower the number the less sensitive your camera’s sensor is to light along with a finer quality of the pictures taken. Higher numbers like 800, 1000, 3200 are generally used in dark/ nightly conditions to attain faster shutter speeds. Higher ISO results in grainy/ noisy pictures.

Picture ISO1 is an example that I recently shot in one of the indoor gardens in DC. The left picture has been shot with lower ISO of 200 and the right one has been shot with higher ISO of 1600.