Hi, I'm Doug McKinlay and you're watching AdoramaTV.
We're here in County Waterford in Ireland and it's springtime. Today for this segment
we're going to look at how to make better springtime pictures and at the same time
we're going to explore the histogram
and its importance to digital photography.
AdoramaTV presents, Stay Focused with Doug McKinlay.
So spring pictures wouldn't be spring pictures without a few
flowers so what we're going to do here is, being the avid gardener that I am
these are the purple beesies I'm going to shoot but I'm going to use a 100mm macro lens
so I get it nice and tight. It's a f/2.8 macro so
I can get some pretty fast shutter speeds
even at 100 ISO
and I'm just going to use the tripod to steady myself really
waiting for the light to sort of hit the right spot, checking the exposure
that's not bad.
I'm just going to change the position a little bit, and go hand-held,
just going to drop the down here for a second. Now I can get real close with this macro
.31 of a meter, we've got to make sure we've got enough
shutter speed to freeze the action but alternatively
we could slow the shutter down a little bit. Let's try that, we'll slow the shutter down,
we'll wait for the wind to pick up and maybe we'll get a little bit of am
impressionistic, Monet kind of look. You can see that it's
a little bit blurry, a little bit of movement, a little bit impressionistic.
So we're going to continue with our spring shots and we're going to still use some flowers,
in this case some daffodils. Now there's a few things you should think about before we
so we get to it I'm think what I sells for starters I'd
do you need to have a higher ISO to get the shutter speed you need
to freeze the action that are you looking for. Your lens choice
can be you know before we use the 100mm macro,
but it could be anything, it could be a 50mm f/1.4 it could be a 24-70mm short zoom
or 70-200 longer zoom, it just really depends what you want to put in the backgrounds,
if anything our aperture choices
now we can really get really, really tight with our depth of field
at f/2.8 so that we get a real blurred background, or we can get greater depth of field
at f/8 or f/11 to bring that background in a little more.
We could use the landscape rules, the rules of thirds, the linear lines etc
to try and make the picture a little
bigger than the flower itself, it's completely
up to the photographers, their creative tools. The other thing I think that
we should think about is to use
is the metering modes likes spot metering, center-weighted
or multi, now I think spot metering is quite a cool little tool
because we can really zone in on the color of a flower. We'll just do that one right now,
so just change your metering to spot,
set the aperture that you want to use, for this one I'm going to use
around f/4, and the appropriate
shutter speed according to the to the meter.
So I want to focus on the back flowers and
blur the front ones out, the sun is popping through
giving a nice backlit, nicely backlit shots,
it's gone again.
You don't necessarily need bright sunny days, in fact sometimes it becomes a bit
too much,
and the colors get a little bit contrasty, so
overcast days give you, I think they give you a better
depth of color when you're shooting this kind of stuff.
But the backlit ones look really good too though!
We've got this really great wall of flowers here, nice
old stonework it's going to give us a nice background. Now I'll swap the lens out for a
50mm and I'm going to keep the aperture fairly wide
around f/4 ish to give us a little narrower depth of field,
shutter speeds are going to be indicated by the light. The sun has popped out so at the moment it's
giving me
a 1000th of a second at 100 ISO so
we should start maybe by mentioning how we use our histograms
at this point. The histograms is a
good tool to use because, especially on a bright day because when you look at the back at the screen
you don't necessarily always see the true
sort of exposure the light can throw it off,
it just doesn't give you the right look,
so if look at the histogram, it's a simple graph
you can bring up on the back of your camera and
it is a more of a technical kind of a view of the picture rather than
the visual view you get from your viewfinder which can
sometimes be a little bit off or if it's a really bright day it's hard to really
ascertain how well the exposure is looking.
So our histogram is a simple graph,
this exposure actually is quite nice, surprisingly,
if the graph was piled up on the right
we would be under exposed, if it was piled up on the left we would be overexposed,
if you see that in your histogram then you have to adjust your exposure a little bit.
So this is kinda nice actually, I think I'll keep that one, having said that though
I don't get too bent out of shape about it, you know, when working on the fly
I don't always have the time to sit back a look at the histograms, but if I'm really in doubt
that's when I'll start looking at the histograms.
I quickly swapped out from my 50mm to a
back to the 100mm macro because I see some bumblebees
getting nectar from flowers, and the macro is a great lens for this kind of stuff,
get up nice and tight, nice and close, you have to be a little fast because
those bees really do move!
I've got a ladybird here, and I've got this 100mm macro on
still, and I'm going to try and see if I can isolate
the Ladybird on a leaf...
a bit of patience,
perseverance.
It's centre frame, ok it's not exactly rule of thirds but we're working on the fly so
sometimes you have to take exceptions to the rules, but we got it nice and sharp,
we've got a whole variety of them here, so shoot more than you think you need
with this kind of stuff.
And don't forget to change your point of view, get up high,
get down low! So that's it from us for our spring tips,
now it's up to you just to get out there and try this stuff. I'm Doug McKinlay
for AdoramaTV,
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