New York: The City That Stole My Heart

Ok so I finally finished going through all of my New York pictures and finished editing and what not so I am finally able to write up this blog post which was supposed to be out last week but we all know me and I was being lazy... So without further ado NEW YORK!
So there are tons and tons and tons of pictures I want to share and gush about but I cant do that because this post would never ever end! So I have just gotten a few of my favorites and I will tell you about these!

So while I was in New York I had both of my cameras with me, my D5000 was for every day use and my D7000 was for when I knew I was going somewhere specifically for pictures. Basically each of these pictures have elements I have previously talked about, how shutter affects night time shots, the f stop affecting brightness and depth, and the ISO affecting brightness.

This lovely beauty was taken while walking around so it was taken with my D5000. It was as you can probably tell a very cloudy day so my settings were F 3.5, ISO 250 and shutter 1/250. These are just simple normal settings for everyday use when its not super bright outside. The only editing I did was when you shoot in raw there is an option called clarity which I love the affect it has on the image as a whole, it basically sharpens the entire image which looks really good when you are shooting landscapes, not so much when you shoot people. I basically did this to all of my shots so I'm telling you now so I don't have to retype this over and over again.

 This shot was taken on top of the Brooklyn bridge of the sky line. It was super freezing cold that night and so worth every frozen breath. My setting for this one was F 11, ISO 250 and shutter 1.6 seconds. I used my remote trigger to take this shot to avoid an sort of shaking that can happen by touching the camera. One of the main reasons for using the remote was the shake factor the other is that I could put my hands in my pockets and trigger the camera from there, it as I mentioned was freezing cold.

 Times square, oh how I loved times square these two shots (top and bottom) were taken around midnight one-ish and as you can tell its still bright and actually quite busy for that time of night! For the top image my settings were at F22, ISO100 and shutter 4.4 seconds. Now these settings make the image super bright because it was one of the first shots I took and I was still testing settings, but in raw you can bring down the brightness so much its amazing. For the bottom shot my settings were F22, ISO 100 and shutter 1/5 I did tone down the brightness a bit in raw but not much, I swear Times Square could blind a man. For both of these shots I used my remote trigger because just like before the shutter was low and I didn't want any shaking of the camera.

 So here begins the snowy fun! all of these were taken in central park when the snow came in a beautiful cold flurry. So this day was super bright and beautiful and cold so for most of the time I was adjusting my shutter super high to compensate when the sun shone just a little bit brighter trying to blind us with the glorious white snow. So for the above picture my settings were F7.1, ISO 250 and shutter 1/1600. The image below was taken with F7.1, ISO 250 and shutter 1/800. This one ended up a bit bright so I did tone down some of the glare of the ice in the lake and turn it black and white.

 The image above was truly amazing because it was backed in central park so finding a nearly abandoned pathway was like a miracle! So my settings were F7.1, ISO 250 and shutter 1/800 just like the image above it. This is a really great time to show how the sun can be super bright for one instance and not another, you may notice sometimes with your eyes but your camera is way more light sensitive than your eyes. The below image was taken with F7.1, ISO 250 and shutter 1/320, this is a great way to look at how f stop affects depth which was earlier discussed but this is a more real world application to it.

These last two images were taken on the Brooklyn bridge just like the skyline picture was, so it was super cold but so worth it. This first shot was actually the first shot I took on the bridge so my settings were F3.5, ISO 2000 and shutter 1.3s. So because of my ISO being so ungodly high the image was super duper bright so I had to bring it down in raw which turned out quite nicely I think. The next picture was taken at F22, ISO 250 and shutter 10 seconds, this one only had to have the brightness taken down a tad on the road but not much else. And again these shots were taken with my wireless remote so I didn't have to worry about the shaking.

So I hope you liked my little tour of New York I sure enjoyed taking the pictures! If you ever get the chance to go to New York please take me with you! But seriously you should go I loved it and I so want to go back! I would live there if it weren't so gosh darned expensive. If you have any questions about how I did any of these don't hesitate to ask! Also I was thinking of possibly putting some of my prints up for sale so if anyone is interested please let me know, there are tons more pictures on my personal facebook page for more print options.

Thank you!

New York Preview!

Ok so I am finally getting around to going through my pictures from New York! So I haven't gone through them all to write up an actual blog post so I am just doing this to give you a preview and to let you know I haven't forgotten about this blog!

Ok so here are a couple from central park and one from the Manhattan bridge. Hopefully I will have the photos sorted by next week, I have over 1000 to go through! It will probably be separated in a couple different posts but we shall see!

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!

I Hear Wedding Bells!

So my cousin got married right before spring break and I figured this is a good opportunity to cover more event type photography.

It was a small civil service with a couple friends and family so it wasn't anything huge and there was so reception to worry about but there was the sun. The sun is your mortal enemy when shooting manual because you cant just keep shooting without looking at your preview screen every now and then. The day started out really cloudy so I figured it should be a little better for the people with no squinting but the weather never does what we want it to it does what it wants to.

The clouds cleared and the sun came out which makes for better background sky than grey. Since the sun came out i had to be a bit more diligent about checking to make sure the sun didn't peak its head out from behind a cloud and make the shot over exposed. For most of my shots my settings were at shutter 1/250, ISO 250 and f-stop at 4.5. This worked for pretty much all of my shots but there were a couple times I had to adjust a little in photoshop. There is no shame in adjusting a couple images in photoshop as long as you are not trying to adjust an image that is really really dark because it will come out grainy and the colors will be off because it wont have all the ranges of color that you would usually have.

Shot wise for weddings you do want to do a wide variety of shots like closeups and further away. Even if they don't want the close up printed you can use it in the back of a collage or in an album if you are photoshoping it. Like the image to the right, I love this image but it doesn't mean I would want an enlarged image of it so you can take it and do something like this:

The only thing you do have to watch out for when doing something like working a wedding is watch your f-stop because lenses will change the f-stop when you zoom in more than likely if you are working with a very low f-stop then your f-stop will go up a bit when you zoom in so just watch that because it will darken your images.

Last but not least I do not recommend shooting manual for a wedding because if you are going from inside to outside with the ceremony or reception you will have to adjust quickly and you might miss something. This wedding was an easy one for me since everything was in the same place but for a regular wedding I would recommend working in shutter preferred or aperture preferred. Which is probably what I will go over in my next post which will be on FRIDAY! 

Yes I am doing a second post this week because last week was spring break and I was busy with work and not being a typical college kid ;p So keep a lookout for the next post on friday :D

Photoshoot with off camera lighting!

Ok so for today's post I will be talking about my shoot with one of my friends last Sunday! This was a fun shoot to do and also very dirty! For most of these images I used off camera lighting and for some I didn't use any at all so everything was natural lighting.

For this shoot I used:
- Nikon D7000
-SB 910
-SB 700
-CowboyStudio NPT-04 (Wireless trigger for my flashes)

On a side note you will now notice a logo on the images, I now have my own facebook like page :D so feel free to go like it: www.facebook.com/sixtysixphotography

For this image my camera settings were at ISO 400, F-stop 5.0 and Shutter 1/250. As for the lighting setup I Put one flash on the ground at about a 30 degree angle shooting at the wall behind her to illuminate that and another flash at the same angle further down to illuminate her and the wall between me and her. Both of the flashes were set at a 1/8 of power so that it didn't overpower the subject. The f-stop is what gives us the depth of field where the wall closest to us is blurry and the subject is in focus.

For this image the camera settings were ISO 320, f-stop 4.5 and the shutter at 1/250. The lighting setup for this was one flash to the left of me on the ground at about a 25-30 degree angle. The flash was on full power and a little further away from the image above so it didn't over power anything. What I was playing with in this image was the shadows so I had the subject step up about 4-5 steps from the wall so that the wall got pretty much all of the subjects shadow on the wall to basically replicate her pose.

This image was fun to shoot because I was on the other side of the building shooting so I couldn't control much. The camera settings were ISO 250, f-stop 5.6 and shutter 1/200. I used a flash on the floor behind her to light up the background, the flash was on full power pointing straight up to the ceiling (it was a pretty tall ceiling).

I honestly had so many from this shoot that I love and all had different setups so i will try to only do 2 more. For this image I used ISO 320, f-stop 5.6 and shutter 1/200, very similar to the last image. For the last image I had some ambient lighting to work with but not too much since the sun was on the other side of the building. For this image I had more ambient light but I didn't have it where I wanted it so i used both my flashes on full power at about a 30 degree angle pointed towards her to light up the room. I used the lower f-stop to create the depth of field where the flowers are in focus and she is blurry in the background.

For the last image I will talk about is this one, i did not use any flash because she was literally 1.5 floors above me on the opposite side of the building so I was working with ambient light the whole way. The camera settings were ISO 250, f-stop 13.0 and shutter 1/250. The sun was coming in straight on her face so I had to adjust for that which is why I make the f-stop higher since I wasn't doing any depth of field work.




So if you liked these images you should check out my facebook page I have more pictures from this shoot!  (dont forget to like the page too!)

Depth of Field

Today is not about a specific shoot it is all about depth of field and how to create it in an image.

 Depth of field often referred to as DOF is the distance between the nearest and farthest objects in a scene or image that appear sharp. So think about it as if the camera were actually your eyes, you can't focus on everything at once, you can switch between focusing on the object closest and an object further away. You can do the same with a camera but at varying degrees. 

DOF is changed by the f-stop,You will often hear this referred to as aperture, this also changes the lightness and darkness of am image so if you aren't using the on camera flash then you will have to make other adjustments. 

A lower f-stop like 4.8 will produce a more intense depth of field. If you notice in the image to the left the silver nail polish is in focus and it gradually makes each nail polish go more and more out of focus. 

The next image is taken with a F-stop of 16.0 notice that the gold nail polish is more in focus than it was in the previous image. 

This image is taken with a f-stop of 32.0 which was all my lens would allow me. Each lens has a different range of f-stops.

I prefer shooting with a lower f-stop so that I have a picture with more depth to it, but there are times I prefer to go to a higher f-stop. When you do any kind of landscape photography you will probably want to opt for a higher f-stop.

Like I said before i prefer to use a lower f-stop to create a focal point like the image above. You can choose which you like better but most cameras on auto will use a lower f-stop so if you aren't 100% sure about going full manual most DSLRs have an option that is "A" which stands for aperture preferred. This setting lets you put the f-stop where you want it and the camera will adjust all the rest of the settings to make you picture look more normal instead of blowing out the image or making it darker. 

I hope this has helped some of you in case you were wondering what the heck I was talking about when I was saying f-stop.

If you have anything you were always wondering how to do you can always request it and I will try my hardest to make it!