Hi I'm Doug McKinlay
and you're watching AdoramaTV.
For today's episode we're gonna look at something
we've looked at before
but with a little bit of a twist.
Street photography is very popular now.
Photographers are making some great images.
For us now though, we're going to add
a little bit of blur to the mix.
First off, it's going to be two-fold.
First fold is going to be us using the
shutter speed, mimicking that.
Secondly, we're going to use the rear curtain sync
on our flash to add something different.
So as I said earlier, we're looking
at putting a little motion into our images
by reducing the shutter speed
and allowing us some motion.
What I'm going to use is a 24-70mm
2.8 medium zoom lens.
I'm going to mount it on the pod
because we want to keep the camera stable,
but keep the subjects moving, obviously.
We want our background stable
but our subjects with some motion in it.
So the first thing we're going to do is get rid
of any filters that are on the lens already,
like the skylight filter.
Take that off.
Then we're going to mount our neutral density filter.
These are leaf filters, I really like these.
This comes with a little filter mount.
It has two slots for two filters so you can
add more if you so desire.
I'm going to set this at 100 ISO because
I'm trying to slow the shutter down.
So I want a lower ISO that can give me
that extra little bit of movement.
In terms of aperture, I'm probably
going to set it around f/8, just to start with.
If I look at the top of my camera here,
for shutter speed at f/8 100 ISO
it's giving me a shutter speed of about 160.
160 is not slow enough.
So we need to slow it down.
The only way we can do that is by using
neutral density filters.
So this is a three stop, let's try that start to start with,
Make sure it's nice and clean.
We set it into the filter holder.
Now because it's only three stop
it's not so opaque that we can't see through it,
or the camera can't see through,
so we can get a proper reading.
Before I said it was at 1/16th at f/8.
Now we check this one,
against the meter, it's going to give us
a shutter speed of about 1/13th.
Now I'm going to go a little slower.
Just going to decrease the size of the aperture
so we'll go down to 11.
I don't wanna go any smaller than 11.
That will give us some movement,
around 1/8 of a second.
That should be good enough.
Now in order to make this thing work properly
without getting the camera shake
we're going to set the driver to 2 second timer.
So when you press the shutter button
they'll take 2 seconds for the shutter to open,
produce the image and hopefully get some blur.
Keep in mind though, with SLR cameras
you're going to get some light leakage in the back
so you need to cover that up with something.
A lot of people use a bit of gaffer tape,
I don't have any so I'm using my bus pass.
I'm just going to set that over the top
and that will block the light coming out.
Then I'm going to wait for my subject.
That's about it.
It's a matter of adjustment from there,
you might have to change the filter.
You might need to have that stronger filter
or one that's not quite as strong,
depending on the light around us.
Today is a bit overcast, it's working in our favor.
It's allowing us a nice even light, for starters,
plus it's allowing us to slow that shutter down
a little better than it would if it was
a sunny bright day.
Obviously we need people in street photography
because that's the whole notion of street photography,
in my opinion anyhow.
I was taught that a picture is not
a picture without a person in it.
May not be 100% correct but in street
photography and reportage I think it's
pretty much on the mark.
Part of that though is waiting for the right moment.
Looking for those people to come into the shot
that you want to get a shot of.
Sometimes they're there, sometimes they're not.
That's the infuriating part of this thing.
I've got a couple of potential victims coming by
at the moment so I'm just going to
quickly slap on my cover across my viewfinder.
Make sure you get no light leakage.
Guess my shot
and hopefully that'll work.
We're going to move on and try a different area,
maybe get a little tighter shots rather than
standing back with this longer lens.
So what we're going to now is get away from
the static of our tripod and get into a
little more motion with our cameras
by using our flash with a technique called
'rear curtain sync'.
So basically how this works is,
we're going to add a little bit of blur
with some freezing action to our image
by using our flash head mounted on our camera body.
Now what rear curtain sync does is,
it flash fires just before the second curtain
closes on the camera.
Thus allowing for some freezing,
at the same time some blurring in the background.
It's a pretty easy technique.
Now, like our last technique,
it does depend on the light.
Now on a bright, overcast day like today
we're going to have to adjust that light
by using neutral density filters to bring that light
down a little bit, to allow us
a slow enough shutter speed
to show us the action.
It's a really great technique to also use indoors
at clubs, at concerts, etc.
It will give you that really great blur
but with that really tight freezing as well.
So using rear curtain sync is a pretty
straightforward technique;
we mount our flash on our camera body,
turn on the rear curtain sync on our flash head
and off we go.
What it does is, it allows us to take a picture
with a slow enough shutter that will
blur the action a little bit
but as the flash head pops
it will freeze some of that action.
How it works is,
the rear curtain on your camera
will start to close and in that split second,
that's when the flash fires allowing us
to freeze that action.
Like our previous technique,
it does depend on light as well.
We're out on a fairly bright overcast day,
we're going to have to adjust that light somehow.
To do that we're going to use neutral density filters
again to slow the shutter down to allow
this effect to take place.
So I've got a 24mm f/1.4 lens attached
to the camera body.
I think what I'm going to do is
set the camera to TV on Canon,
which is shutter priority.
So we want to control that shutter
and I'm going to let the camera do the aperture.
We're going to bring it down.
I'm just guessing here, this is something
that you'll figure out as you go along.
it could be 1 second, could be 2 seconds,
could be 10 seconds, I don't know.
We're going to start with 1 second.
Turn the flash head on.
As you can see, the little shuttlecock symbol
here on this flash means that
rear curtain sync has already turned on.
I'm shooting in manual mode so power
is way down.
I might just bump that power up a little bit,
up to 1/16th of power and then go from there.
I've got to turn the flash head down a little bit.
I'm going to adjust the shutter speed so that
my exposure is correct, it's not flashing.
You can see it's flashing here,
it's telling me I'm overexposed.
So I'm just going to bring it down to about 1 second.
From that point we're pretty much good to go.
The next thing is to find the subject.
What I like to do with handheld rear curtain sync
photography is, you can shoot it straight on
but I quite like my subjects moving.
I quite like moving the camera a little bit,
it's a little bit like painting with light.
You get some really cool effects.
It's a really creative method,
it just takes a bit of time and a little bit
of energy to get used to it.
You're definitely not going to get it the first time.
It's definitely hit and miss.
Keep practicing, it's fun.
I'm Doug McKinlay for AdoramaTV,
thanks for watching.
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