Water water everywhere but not a drop to drink!

Well at least I would hope you aren't planning on drinking this particular water... So today's post is gonna be about one of my favorite things to photograph, you guessed it! Water! So today we are going to talk about water in relation to your shutter speed and how you can achieve different looks with different shutters! So I don’t have a model for this post because I want you to get the idea of the water first also you would need a model whos also a statue for some of these!

So we are going to start with what you usually see from me that that’s more of a frozen in time water. For this shot my settings my ISO at 250, shutter at 1/250 and f-stop at 9.

Here comes the fun part, if you slow your shutter you can achieve a more painted look from the water with its movement so on the extreme other side you get this:

For this one my shutter was at 1/8 (Which is where the whole model standing still thing comes into play) my f-stop at 32 (remember since the shutter is lower you will have to make the f-stop higher to compensate for the amount of light you are letting in the lens) and my ISO stayed the same at 250.

Now here are some in betweens on how we got to this point:

Shutter 1/10, F-stop 29, ISO 250

Shutter 1/15, F-stop 20, ISO 250

Shutter 1/40, F-stop 14, ISO 250

Shutter 1/100, F-stop 11, ISO 250

So as I've said before water is one of my favorite things to photograph because there are just so many different options you have with photographing it! Until next time!

Lets Have Some Tea!

Ok well not really but yesterday I was up in San Antonio because I can, well actually because I was taking a mini vacation and went to Six Flags on Monday then Tuesday we went to the Japanese Tea Gardens and the mall. So first I would like to apologize for not having a post last week I was super busy with work getting ready for the wedding fair and my days got away from me.

So today I am sharing some of my pictures from the Japanese Tea Gardens with you. The place is unbelievably beautiful I wish I could have stayed longer but it was super hot and we were super tired.
There are lots of stairs there so just warning you if you have any sort of physical problem just be careful because the stairs are made of stone so they aren’t really level.

For this my camera was set to F-5.6, my ISO at 250, my shutter is what changed depending on if I was shooting in the shadows or in the sun, the highest my shutter went was1/640 and the lowest was 1/160. The brighter the spot the higher the shutter but the lower the shutter the more likely you are to catch movement so usually I recommend changing the f-stop if you don’t mind the depth of field difference. The only reason I was doing the shutter was because I only took my D5000 and its easier to change the shutter than the f-stop.

So these are some of my favorite images from the gardens, I have tons more but I don't want to have y'all scrolling forever and ever looking at pictures so here's a couple more shots, I will probably post more on my photography page as well as my personal page so you can see them there.

Sorry this post is going up late life got in the way...

Some Favs

Ok so my eye has been twitching for the past 4 days now and I am about ready to gouge it out so needless to say I really don't have the patience to actually write out a whole blog post because I have a feeling I might just self assassinate... so instead I have decided to share some of my favorite pics with you from all sorts of time periods, some recent and have been posted some I haven't posted but might if I need another filler day. I will probably write a little bit about each pic but not go into detail of how i achieved it more or less just when it was done so I will try to put them in order of when I took them... So without further ado:

So these three pictures were one of the first pics that I took that kind of made me realize how much I liked photography and that was what I wanted to do with my life. Now these three pics were definitely by no means great, of course young aspiring me thought they were pretty damn good but looking back there are so many things I could change which sadly I cant do because two of these pics I don't have the original files anymore because I have a love hate relation ship with desktops and I never used to back up my stuff onto a separate drive. Can you blame me? I was in high school when this happened. Now I back everything up, twice... So if you take anything out of this trip down memory lane please learn to back up everything!

 Next in line is this gorgeous baby, this was taken in my digital photography class on our first photo shoot outing. This was my first time handling my very own DSLR which was my Nikon D5000 which I still have. I was not yet shooting in manual because I was still learning but this picture is by far my best accomplishment from that class. Sometimes I honestly cant believe that I took this pic...



























So after that sometime during Christmas of course right now i cant remember which Christmas but I was up in El Paso for Christmas and it snowed! So of course I whipped out my D5000 and ran outside without gloves on and froze my pretty little fingers off but out if it i got some amazing pictures of snow that rarely ever happens in south Texas and usually happens in El Paso after we leave. By this time I knew how to shoot manual and everything here on out was shot in manual.


Next up was night time photography, my co-worker at the time had gotten me interested in night time photos and so he took me where he liked to shoot and I came up with this baby!.








The  next time we went out we trekked up the Harbor Bridge and did some amazing pictures from up there and soon we are going back for fourth of July to take pics of the fireworks!

So these pictures were taken for one of my friends moms boyfriend, thats a mouthful... He was making a CD and these were some detail shots from the session which I love and honestly have no use for but to post them here maybe one day I will have to use these in a class or something.










This picture was taken at a convention back in November and i just love everything about this picture, the lighting the pool, the convention gave us lots of down time and if we ever film the rest of the video I will post that even though it wasn't photography.

Next up was the water pictures which is the first ever blog post that I posted. There were so many from this shoot that I loved and the entire experience was fun too!

Last but not least this picture! This pic is probably one of my favorites by far, the lighting I'm in love with, the shadows, the pose, the everything... I know there are probably things I could change but this picture but I wouldn't just saying. 

So I hope you had fun taking a trip with me down memory lane, I know I had some fun because I was unearthing things I completely forgot about... So hopefully my eye stops twitching and I might get to post up something else. Today was originally gonna be a post about graduation since one of my friends graduated this past weekend but I forgot the memory card at home thanks the the ever annoying twitch in my eye... 

Aperture Preferred? Shutter Preferred?

So this post today is to get to know your beautiful DSLR better! This is not about one specific photoshoot so it will have a small mix to get my point across. Now most people who don't know how to shoot manual usually shoot in auto which is the little green camera if you have a newer dial type of camera I believe on older DSLRs it is the P option which stands for program auto which gives you a small range of options that you can change, but that is not why we are here today!

Today I am going to tell you about the Aperture Preferred option and the Shutter Preferred option. In the first image I am showing you the Nikon D700 so for that one to get to either option you have to hold down the mode button and turn the dial that is by your thumb till you hit the A or the S. Can you guess which is which? On the image to the right I am showing you the Nikon D7000 and to change the modes on that one you turn the dial till the white mark on the side is pointing at the option you want.

Now on the the fun stuff! For the Aperture Preferred you will use this option when you know that you want to create a image with a good depth of field but you don't know what to put the other settings at. If you look back to my depth of field post you will know what I'm talking about when I say depth of field. So basically you can create something like this where your subject in the front is in focus and the back is blurred.

Basically for this you are setting your f-stop and the camera changes the shutter/ISO to make the image usable  Using this option help you learn a little more about your camera because it will adjust your other settings  to make the image come out close to what you want. Now while on this setting you are going to want to put your ISO on to auto so it adjusts that you, this isn't exactly necessary but it helps with the quality.



The next one is the Shutter Preferred, and you guessed it, it lets you adjust the shutter and then it takes care of the rest. Now you may wonder when the heck do I want to do that? The answer is simple when you want to capture an image in stopped motion so if you are taking pictures of your child's soccer game or your friends children running around the playground. This way you don't end up with blurred movement. Also this is good if you know that you cant hold a camera steady worth a damn and don't have a tripod handy.You could also use it to help replicate and image like the one from my very first blog post. This way you don't have to worry about the other settings in the camera just the shutter. 

This is also helpful if you want to shoot something where there is movement visible. The best example I can come up with and unfortunately do not have on hand to show is water. If you are photographing some type of waterfall and you put a low shutter the water has a tendency to come out a looking like it was painted. I will hopefully get an image up here for that soon but I don't have any right now.

Now you can go out there and try out different settings and hopefully learn something about what shutters and f-stops do in conjunction with each other. Remember practice practice practice!

Its All About the Setup

Since I just now decided to start this blog I don't have a picture of my setup for this first post but this one is all about your setup and timing. I sketched out what the basic setup was in Photoshop so hopefully you can understand what I did.

So to start you will need:
-A pale or something to have the water in (I used a paint liner that was painted black)
-A flash (Nikon SB 900, I used the SB because it has a higher sync speed than a strobe so you can used a faster shutter)
-Camera (duh!)
-A paper with different colors printed on it (make it in Photoshop or paint, 2 colors preferred)
-Something to drop water into the pale (for this I rigged up a bag to continuously drop, but if you have a helper you can have them drop the water for you)
-A tripod (optional)
-A stand for the flash (or a helper)
-A Table to setup on
-An off camera flash system (you can use a corded system, pocket wizard, Yongnuo, whatever your heart desires it just has to be off of the camera)

So to start I got the paint liner and filled it with water and placed it on the table. For the water droplets I filled up a bag and rubber-banded (you can tape or just hold it) it to a backdrop stand so that I could have a constant water drop and I didn't have to time it just right with someone else. The I taped the paper to the back side of the paint liner and taped to top of the paper to where the bag was connected. For the flash I had a helper and he would hold it and tilt it as I needed. but the key thing is to have the flash pointed at the paper across the water so the colors reflect across the water. This is what it should look like with no water droplets:

Now for shooting it I recommend using a macro lens so you can get closer to the droplet without having to crop in and reduce the ability to print on a larger canvas. Now with a macro lens you are going to have to clean off the lens because when the water drops it does splash a little. The other option is to use a longer lens but even those have limitations on how close you can really get to the droplet.

Next for the settings in my camera I had my ISO at 250, my shutter at 1/2500, and my aperture at 14.0. you can mess with these settings as much as you want but the high shutter is a must if you are wanting to "freeze time". My ISO is usually at 250 when shooting indoors with a flash, its pretty much my golden ISO. For my aperture I wanted pretty much all of the image in focus so I went with a higher f stop. The camera I was using was a Nikon D7000, that really doesn't matter in this or anything else because you can get this image with any camera that has a fully manual mode or even a partially manual mode, you just need to control the shutter.

For focusing it will be hard since you are basically focusing on a plain black surface so what I did was figure out where the drops were landing and used a straw to focus on that then turned the focus to manual. At this point you only have to refocus if you move, and I do recommend moving, try different angles its what makes the image better. You can as I mentioned before move the flash around at certain angles it reflects better in the droplets that are in the air making them stand out more.

Pretty much every image that you capture will be different and don't be afraid to take too many, its all digital now so you aren't wasting film. Do keep in mind your flash can only take so much, don't over heat it, especially if you are using the SB 900 that one overheats really quickly but it did me just fine for this shoot. Now I don't know exactly what the flash was set at but I usually start it at its regular default power and just turn it up and down as I feel it needs. For shoots like this I usually don't change the flash settings I mostly change the camera settings.

Here are a couple more from this shoot: