Photo-a-day

[YorkieBen]

From a nice day in the Dales yesterday

[Ruggerbugger]

Edinburgh Castle, last week, in the rain

[tfboy]

A few from last night at my father's Milonga gig...

Setting up...


Later on in the evening, smiles are all around (ISO 1600, 85mm, f/1.4, 1/60s)


Towards the end, it was rather busy (ISO 800, 26mm, f/3.5, 1/15s)


But shooting at this kind of event was rather tricky. I resisted the urge to use flash so everything's done with the available "natural" lighting and it's predominantly red, for that close, intimate, sexy ambiance Doesn't half make colour balance fun though. In the end, I set it to 2200K and it's still rather red! Going any further just kills the atmosphere, as would have been the case if I'd used flash.

I still have a lot to learn and experiment for these kinds of events

[Bobster]

looks like a great evening and some good experience for you

i was second shooting on Sat up in Warwick

[tfboy]

looks like a great evening and some good experience for you

Thanks Bob, certainly was.
Most annoying part probably was that although I was metering manually to get decent exposure, the light metering of course only works on overall / white levels. A lot of my shots are completely blown in the red department because of the lighting. Was good to practice focusing manually too. At that shallow DoF, it's not easy.

In the shot below, is there anything you would recommend doing to get it better, either at the time of shooting or in post?



Thanks!

[Blastuk]

had a bbq on the beach yesterday, snapped this of a some random people

[driftwoodywood]

hey, loving the pics, ive only had my camera for around 3 weeks, but i am loving it, especialy like ruggerbugger's the way, when i can ill post one or 2 of my pic's that ive done so far

[kalniel]

In the shot below, is there anything you would recommend doing to get it better, either at the time of shooting or in post?

Completely ignorant post here, but would using a light cyan filter have helped? I'm thinking that it might filter out some of the red light, meaning the scene would be very darkly lit, but at least you could expose for that and not worry about the red channel clipping.

http://www.cokin.com/ccfilters.html

[driftwoodywood]

hey, this pic is from a trip from this weekend, its in milan, i have a few nice ones from parma and bolonga too, will upload them later, what do you think, any coments would be good

[brammers]

Completely ignorant post here, but would using a light cyan filter have helped? I'm thinking that it might filter out some of the red light, meaning the scene would be very darkly lit, but at least you could expose for that and not worry about the red channel clipping.

Some people do use coloured filters to equalise the light levels hitting the sensor, but it's more a tripod/landscape technique than an action technique really - the filter sucks up light leading to longer exposures, and if you wanted to use it for coloured lighting then you'd have to change filter each time the colour of the light changed...

The solution is simple but not always easy - just try really, really hard not to blow the highlights at high ISO. At 1600,3200 etc, even on a D700, the files become very 'brittle' - increasing exposure results in a lot of noise, highlights can't be pulled back as much as they can at native sensor sensitivity.

You can also set your camera to UniWB to record a RAW level histogram - it can help you see what your camera really sees rather than the JPG based histogram with curves etc already applied. Won't help you with shooting, but you can review and shoot again. Google for that one.

Nothing wrong at all with using flash while maintaining ambience TFboy - take a look at Bobster's fairground wedding portrait a few pages back.

[tfboy]

Some people do use coloured filters to equalise the light levels hitting the sensor, but it's more a tripod/landscape technique than an action technique really - the filter sucks up light leading to longer exposures, and if you wanted to use it for coloured lighting then you'd have to change filter each time the colour of the light changed...

The solution is simple but not always easy - just try really, really hard not to blow the highlights at high ISO. At 1600,3200 etc, even on a D700, the files become very 'brittle' - increasing exposure results in a lot of noise, highlights can't be pulled back as much as they can at native sensor sensitivity.

You can also set your camera to UniWB to record a RAW level histogram - it can help you see what your camera really sees rather than the JPG based histogram with curves etc already applied. Won't help you with shooting, but you can review and shoot again. Google for that one.

Nothing wrong at all with using flash while maintaining ambience TFboy - take a look at Bobster's fairground wedding portrait a few pages back.

Thanks Andy. The thing about the flash is that unlike Bobster's great photo, with such a red-tainted environment, I don't think I could have used the flash, even at it's lowest power as a balance light fill because the colours wouldn't have matched. I do have an orange filter and did use it for the table snaps where actually it didn't work out too bad. So maybe I should have tried on the dancers. Oh well, next time

[Ruggerbugger]

Another from the Castle, thick mist descended for half the day

[Funkstar]

Ooh, thats a good one. I like that

[brammers]

Thanks Andy.

Adam, not Andy - that's my dad! You can put filters over flashes too, although this doesn't help if the light changes. I also think you're over-estimating the amount of change a touch of fill flash can give - this was shot under harsh yellow light:



Ruggerbugger - loving the mist in that shot

[Ruggerbugger]

Ruggerbugger - loving the mist in that shot

Thanks, got a wider angle with more space on the left, but I like the tight focus and b & w conversion in this one.

That's a pretty stunning pose there, where was that taken?

Here's another

[Ruggerbugger]

A 10 second exposure of a plasma ball in the Camera Obscura exhibition