Last week I did an experiment with Candice to try and do a strobist test shoot in my bedroom using my red wooden sliding door as the backdrop.
This is the result. Beside the stunningly beautiful model, and anyone can take good picture of her, I’m still proud of my lighting, haha.
Edited a little bit in Lightroom for exposure and fill-light
And stealing my brother's acoustic guitar.
First time using 3 lights indoor.
This is my setup:
The bottom left: SB-600 with reflective umbrella
The bottom right: SB-900 with Stofen aimed at the ceiling for reflection. My ceiling is around 2,5 meter high.
The upper right: SB-600 with shoot through umbrella
shot with 35mm f/2 on d700 and on-camera commander flash
Monash Photography Club recently asked me to teach a workshop about ‘Zoo photography’ because they are organising a zoo trip next week to the Melbourne Zoo. If anybody wants to come, feel free to contact them:
There are just some animal you can’t afford to get close, think of tiger, bear and rhino. If you get close, they’ll rip you apart. To capture them in all their glory, you just gotta use long lenses.
Long lenses have shallower depth of field, making it easy to shoot through fences.
I personally love my 80-200 f2.8 for zoo trips.
2. Fill the Frame
Handsome Roo!
And his friend the Emu!
When you fill the frame with the subject, and excluding everything else, you will evoke a sense of intimacy and connection between the viewer and the animal. You can either use long lens or crop it in post processing.
3. Get down to their level
Mr Meerkat on the lookout
Lizard doing his thing
It is the same technique we use when photographing children. When you get down to their level, you make the photograph just a little bit more personal.
4. Select good background
The background should NOT distract the viewer’s eye from the cute or fierce animal you are shooting. Try to get a homogenous leaves or pattern for the background.
Super bokeh for ms owlie
So, which one is the head? top or bottom?
If you can’t avoid a distractive background, just blur it out with bokeh. Your long lens and wide aperture will help.
5. Shoot through fences or glass
When you have to shoot though fences or glass, zoom in as long as possible, and open your aperture as wide as possible, and get as close as possible to the fence or glass.
Just repeating:
- longest zoom
- widest aperture
- closest you can get to the fence
Mr and Mrs Lion resting.
It will throw the fence or the glass out of focus, and the viewer will get the illusion of you standing directly infront of the lion.
6. DO NOT use flash
You don't want to make me blind, do you?
Unless you know what you are doing. Flash could potentially scare the animal away. Besides, if you are using flash at night, you could blind all the night-vision animal like owl and cats.
7. Walk around, change your perspective
Do-Re-Mi!
If you couldn’t get a good shoot from your location, don’t just wait in place. Go walk around, jump up a bench, get low, or whatever. Too many people stand in one place and keep shooting, and ended up with the same images. You want variety.
8. If you want to include human in the picture…
WATCH OUT!
Oh, i luv u i luv u i luv u i luv u i luv u i luv u
I-forgot-whats-his-name eating a mouse!
Make sure that they look natural. Avoid posed pictures. Unless you are at the ‘Touch this animal’ section of the zoo.
9. Capture the animal doing human-like activity
Grandpa Roo scratching his back
Don't even think about what you are thinking now
This will introduce humor into the picture, and will make your viewer smile.
BONUS
Oh yeah baby! Kangaroo porn!
Have you ever seen a kangaroo’s balls & penis? well, here is it
Sometimes you are presented with a good photographic opportunity, out of the blue. You are just having fun walking around the river bank with some pals, while suddenly you hear loud bang and beautiful lights filling up the night sky. You take out your camera and prepare to take the next one (you always bring your camera with you, right? ). You set your camera to aperture priority and tried to take some shots, but because of the low light (heck, the sky is pitch black) your camera set the shutter to 2 seconds to compensate. You got the shot, but its totally blurry. You then change to setting to shutter priority to 1/50 second to avoid camera shake. But all you are getting is pitch black images. You wonder what you should do now?
I reckon most of you have experienced that type of event before. Now we will explore several options you can try to (hopefully) get a decent night shoot without using tripod.
Increase the ISO rating
Maybe its just me, but I think grainy images is much better than no usable image at all.
ISO 400 1.6" f16 - My first try of the night. I was bracing againts a light pole to gain stability. Notice the fireworks are sharp but the background lights are very blurry. Which give this image a little bit more additional impact.
Bracing Your Camera/Your Body Against Something Solid
There is two way of doing this. If you are using SLR without swivel screen, the it will be lots of trial and error. But if you have point and shoot with swivel, this will be easier. This is fairly easy. Just put your camera on the ground/fence/car or anything solid, but pointed up to the fireworks, with your right hand on the shutter, but bracing on the solid object. Usually with some practice you can get pretty good steady images.
ISO 400 f4.5 1/2" - I brace my camera on the fence to get this shot. Set the focus manually to infinity, then we are good to go.
The other way is to brace your body against a big solid object. Maybe a solid wall or a electric pole. Make sure you dont destroy it
Well, thats it for now? Do you have any other tips you would like to share? Drop em in the comment area.
The rule of thirds is a very useful tool for composing images in photography. And to top it off, it’s free! Doesn’t require any add on equipment to your camera, any shoe mounts, anything like that! This article will attempt to demystify the mysterious Rule of Thirds. This post is a follow up from my [...]
So you just bought your first digital camera. You started taking photos of friends and family. Full of excitement, you printed out the photos and showed them to your loved ones. Great. Everybody likes the photos, but you wonder, can you get better picture with your simple point and shoot cameras? When taking pictures with [...]
Ideas Presented by Your Guide to Digital Photography You might be wondering how do you start making money with photography. You own a camera, you studied photography, and you have been shooting photos for long time. It’s easier than you may think to start making money as a digital photographer. There are many different ways [...]
Today we will talk about the art of panorama photography. Panoramic photos in definition is just several photos stitched together with a post processing programs. Normally people use this technique to combine photos of beautiful landscapes that is too beautiful to be captured with one single frame. This tutorial will be divided into two section. [...]
Once in while I receive e-mails or phone calls from aspiring or beginner wedding photographers asking me for advise on how to become successful in the wedding field. My first question is always what their motivation is to become a wedding photographer. Some will reply that they heard from somebody that it is easy money, [...]
This tutorial is for those who are still using Lightroom 2. If you have Lightroom 3, please go to this tutorial So I posted a tutorial on how to create copyright signature with Lightroom sometime ago. I got some question from readers on how to put the copyright watermark into the border to not obstruct [...]
Night photography is very interesting and unique. A building could appear normal and boring at day, yet look majestic during the night. Cityscape usually look best captured at night with all the lights from the building subtly brighten the sky above. Funnily, the first time i tried night photography was with MPC last year as [...]
Last week i hosted a photography workshop for my club (Monash Photography Club). It was intended for the beginner as around 60% of our club member regard themselves as beginner in photography. The workshop was attended by around 50 students, which exceeds all our expectation. We even run out of pizza! I received lots of [...]
