Everyone loves to receive a parcel!

A few essential photographic supplies arrived this morning in a lovely cardboard box full of styrofoam chips. I wasn't the only one excited about the contents! I used a splash of ring flash with -1 stop of flash exposure compensation (FEC) to balance the strong side lighting.

See more Kent portrait photography.

Using ring flash for portrait photography

Ring flashes are particularly popular with fashion photographers as they create almost shadowless light (the flash unit wraps around the end of the lens - hence light is coming from all directions), reduce the visibility of skin imperfections, produce a very soft-edged shadow, and remove the need for any other lighting. They're very expensive and used primarily in a studio setting.

I've just purchased a much cheaper variant from Speed Graphic, a ring flash adaptor which attaches to my Canon 580 EXII Speedlite (as shown in the above picture). It uses a system of internal prisms and reflectors to distribute the light evenly around the lens.

I had my first go with the adaptor yesterday and quickly realised that it's going to take some getting used to. It's not practical to use in low light as the unit completely blocks the autofocus-assist beam on the 580EX II. It considerably diminishes the power output of the flash and also seems to seriously perturb the E-TTL (evaluative through-the-lens) flash metering system, with some shots badly underexposed and others overexposed. I need to learn how the camera behaves when this unit is attached. Having said that, I managed to get some great results in situations that have previously proved problematic, such as my daughter Emily enjoying her bathtime. Lighting most bathrooms is tricky due to all the reflective surfaces, such as tiles and mirror, creating far too many shadows.

In conclusion, not an essential item, but I am pleased to have it in my arsenal of portrait photography gear.

Basic Principles of Colour Management

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I don't claim to be an expert on colour management but I think I understand the basics (if after reading this you think that I don't, then please feel free to post a comment and correct me). However, that's all I want to write about in this post - the basic principles.

In an ideal world you'd take a picture of, or scan in, the colour chart above and it would look identical to the original on both your monitor and when printed out. For this to occur your digital camera, or scanner, needs to record the colours accurately, your monitor needs to display them accurately and your printer needs to output them accurately. As I'm sure you're all aware, the world, alas, is far from ideal.

For an example of this struggle with colour, think about a TV showroom - loads of TV sets side-by-side displaying the same channel but with each picture looking very different. Not only is there huge variability between models but also variability between individual TV sets in the same range.

The bottom line is that electronic and digital devices struggle to handle colours accurately - they need feedback to know how well they're doing. We therefore measure precisely how the device is handling colour (as the spectrophotometer would be doing if the monitor in the above picture was turned on) and then construct a correcting colour profile for that device. This in a nutshell is colour management.

I'll concentrate on colour management in the digital photography workflow in a subsequent post. I colour manage my monitor for wedding photography with a Gretag Eye-One device.

One last HDR shot

One last HDR shot from the Burlington Hotel, Folkestone - their magnificent staircase. I hope I've inspired you to have a go at the HDR technique over the last three posts - it's very easy.

Please check out my revamped wedding photography galleries page - I've featured a shot from each wedding and indicated the number of photos people received for the time I spent with them. Invaluable information for the discerning client!

The Burlington Hotel, Folkestone, Kent

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Above is another HDR shot from the photoshoot at the Burlington Hotel yesterday (see a Kent wedding gallery at this location). Notice how you can see detail outside the window and in the dark corner with the flowers.

The shot below is a single RAW capture stretched to the absolute limits using the recovery and fill-light features of the Adobe camera raw interface - it wouldn't stand up to close scrutiny as this sort of digital processing introduces a lot of noise. However, it's pretty impressive nonetheless and why I always shoot in RAW format.

Shooting interiors with high dynamic range

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I photographed Chris and Sue's wedding in Folkestone at the Burlington Hotel last month. The hotel subsequently asked me if I could shoot some interiors for them so I went along this afternoon. I decided that this would be a perfect opportunity to use high dynamic range (HDR), illustrated by the shot shown above.

The human eye and brain can deal with a huge tonal range - you take it for granted until you start doing photography and then realise how limited cameras are. It can be a bright sunny day but you can see still detail in the sky near the sun and the shadiest spot under a tree - and all at the same time. Estimates suggest that human vision can deal with over 15 stops of light (bear in mind that 'one stop' means doubling the amount of light so this means a tonal range of 2 to the power of 15 - very impressive). Cameras can deal with only about 6 stops of light - shooting RAW allows another 2 stops to be reclaimed with digital processing. To really start expanding this you need to combine more than one photograph (or alternatively, as landscape photographers do, you compress the tonal range by using a graduated neutral density filter). So for the above shot I set my camera on a tripod and then took 3 photographs - one at the exposure metered by the camera, and then one at -2 stops and one at +2 stops. The hard work is done by a piece of software called Photomatix Pro which combines the three shots into one by a process called tone-mapping (Photoshop can also do this but the batch-processing feature in Photomatix is a real winner). It's great fun but try and exercise some restraint - it's very easy to overcook the effect!

Photoshop Actions for Wedding Photography

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Just purchased Jeff Ascough (one of the world's most highly regarded wedding photographers) Photoshop Actions II. These install into Photoshop and allow you to run his treatments on your own shots. Initial impressions are very favourable. The actions are elegant, customisable and the finished photos look terrific. The above shot (from Donna and Paul's wedding in Hythe) was treated using a process called 'Silk Stocking' - a digital version of a traditional black-and-white printing technique which bleeds the shadows into the highlights. The actions are easily set-up for batch processing allow hundreds of photos to be processed at a time - fantastic!

Band photoshoot in Kent

I photographed my chums in EK1 last night at Acol village hall. For the individual portrait shots I used my own lighting system but for the full group shots we had to improvise using their stage lights (without coloured filters). It took a bit of juggling to reduce the effects of hotspots but the results are surprisingly good for such a Heath Robinson set-up - necessity is the mother of invention as they say. I've done a very crude cut-out using Photoshop in the shot above to remove the background.

Metering and exposure

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The amount of light falling on a subject, or incident light, is what determines exposure. Please read that sentence again. This is what you measure with an incident light meter (by pointing the light dome at the source of light) and is the most reliable method for determining exposure. It's much more convenient though (imagine if the tabby cat above was a tiger) to have a light meter built into the camera. This meter, however, can only measure reflected light from the subject - from this the camera must then infer the amount of incident light illuminating the subject and this is where the problems start. Replace the tabby cat above with a white cat and then a black cat. We'll keep the incident light constant and therefore the exposure will also remain constant - remember, exposure is determined by incident light. The white cat will reflect more light to the camera than the tabby cat, which will reflect more than the black cat. Cameras are programmed to assume that the average reflectance for a scene is 18% - equivalent to a mid-grey tonality - which indeed does work very well for most scenes. The camera does not understand that the three scenes with the cats have different brightnesses due to differing amounts of reflected light, it assumes that the incident light is different in each case and thus determines different exposures for each of the scenes. The solutions are:

i) use an incident light meter (not so practical when the cats are tigers).

ii) meter off a mid-grey subject in the same light - either use a grey card or learn to spot mid-grey tonality by eye. You can zoom in on a particular area to meter or spot-meter, if you have the option.

iii) exposure compensate. In the case of the white cat the increased reflectance fools the camera into thinking that the incident light is stronger than it really is, so the camera ends up underexposing - therefore you need to 'open up' the camera and increase the exposure. The trick is knowing by how much. In the case of the black cat the camera overexposes and so you 'stop down' the camera.

iv) if you shoot digitally learn to read the histogram for a shot - it's instant feedback on exposure and is what the majority of pros do (it's also what I do for my wedding photography).

Please feel free to post a comment if I've confused you!

Digital trickery with Photoshop

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I decided to add an 'About me' page to my main website yesterday (Kent wedding photographer profile) and thought I'd include a quirky family shot, hopefully demonstrating creativity, humour and Photoshop skills in the process. The shot above took only ten minutes to put together. The three separate photos were placed in layers and then the shots of my wife and I were reshaped using Edit - Transform - Distort. Very simple when you know how!

Adding a professional touch

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A very easy way to give a professional touch to your photographs is to add a stroke line and border - as in the photograph above (taken in Trinidad, Cuba). In Photoshop this is accomplished by Edit - Select All, Edit - Stroke (choose colour and thickness, then set location to inside) and then Image - Canvas size (click relative and then specify the width of the border). Very simple. Check out some examples of this technique on my Kent portrait photography page.

Portrait photography when travelling

I love taking pictures of the locals when I travel. I always check that they're happy having their photo taken by waiting for a smile or nod and am happy to grease a palm if they're particularly photogenic. The above shot was taken at the magical Angkor Wat in Cambodia. I have a selection of travel photos on my website but there's no direct link - go to my Kent wedding photographer homepage and then type travel after the backslash.

AI servo mode

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Autofocus systems are so sophisticated that they have no trouble locking on to moving subjects, such as Lucy above (click to see her portrait gallery). There's no need to pre-focus on a set point and wait for the subject to run into focus, just set your Canon camera to AI (artificial intelligence) servo mode, lock focus on the subject and then fire away. Combined with the high frame rate of modern cameras this makes it easy to capture sharp action shots.

Autofocus systems can be fooled

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The idea of having to shoot a wedding without autofocus would not be an appealing prospect. Autofocus allows you to respond to situations incredibly quickly and is stunningly accurate. Modern cameras and lenses are designed specifically for autofocus - the throw on lenses (the distance the focal plane moves in response to adjustments to the focusing ring) is not suitable for manual focus. Autofocus is more accurate than my eyesight, even though I've replaced the Ee-A focusing screen in my Canon EOS 5D with the Ee-S variant (only suitable for lenses faster than f/2.8 due to reduced light reaching the viewfinder the Ee-S delivers - to quote Canon - "a steeper parabola of focus to make the image pop in and out of focus more vividly"). Autofocusing systems do, however, occasionally struggle. In the photograph above (wedding photography in Sandwich, Kent) the camera has focused on the wall behind the subjects, despite the fact that I focused upon the line of contrast between the bride's face and her hair, and the camera confirmed locking focus on this point (I only ever have one autofocusing point active on the camera - for the above shot the central one). I've got away with it in this case as shooting at f/8.0 has given me sufficient depth-of-field (DOF) [this photo has been significantly cropped, I was standing much further away than it appears giving a greater DOF which extends 1/3 in front of the focal point, 2/3 behind]. I've looked through a lot of other wedding photographer's books and online photos recently and noticed that this is a common occurence. The solution? If there is a tempting target for your autofocus system sitting just behind your subjects, focus on something else at the same distance - in the case above I'd be tempted by the border between the white and blue dresses. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.

Emily in black and white

Since the English summer is in full flow today, and may not last long, it's going to be a brief post. A picture of my daughter Emily (click to see her full portrait portfolio) taken this morning with bright sunlight streaming in through the window. hence the high contrast.

The wedding photographer's camera bag

A breakdown of my wedding photography kit. I'll share more detailed information on specific items in future posts.

In the centre:

Canon EOS 5D

Canon BG-E4 battery grip

Custom Brackets Digital Pro-M kit

Canon Speedlite 580EX II

Lastolite Micro Apollo light modifier XL

Canon off-camera shoe cord 2

Moving to the left in the above picture:

Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 L II USM

Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8 L USM

Canon EF 85mm f/1.2 L USM

Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 USM Macro

Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8 L IS USM

All the lenses have B+W F-PRO MRC filters mounted for protection.

Moving to the right:

Canon Extender EF 2x II

Lensbaby - original

2x Canon Speedlite 580EX II

Canon Speedlite Transmitter ST-E2

Also in my bag (but not pictured above):

Sekonic flash master L-358

Lastolite tri-grip reflector

Homemade diffusers

2x Lighting stands with Novoflex ballheads

Flash gels with homemade holders

10x 4Gb SanDisk Extreme III CF cards

Remote release cable

Manfrotto monopod 676B

Cokin circular polariser P-series

Cokin neutral density graduated filters

Enough spare batteries to illuminate the Blackpool lights

All packed (just) into a Lowepro Stealth Reporter D560 AW bag & large plastic box.

Near to hand I also have:

Canon EOS 350D (back-up digital body)

Manfrotto 190X PRO-B tripod

Manfrotto 486RC2 ball and socket head

Small step ladder

The roving Kent wedding photographer

Tomorrow I shall reveal to you the kit that I use when I photograph a wedding. In the meantime I show you how I transport it! It weighs a ton, but provided there aren't too many stairs I don't suffer. Generally there are too many stairs.

Black and white portrait photography

Good black and white photography yields an almost primeval power - it has such visual impact. One of the keys is to achieve a good tonal range, which I hope I've illustrated with the above shot of Jack. Further examples can be seen on my portrait photography page. These results generally require a lot of additional work after taking the shot - either in the darkroom, using techniques pioneered by Ansel Adams, or using digital processing software such as Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop. The latest versions of these programs allow you to mimic the effects of all the classic B&W filters in order to enhance contrast. Another key technique is dodging (lightening) and burning (darkening) which gives you very precise control of contrast. Be prepared to experiment!

Noise reduction using Neat Image

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I usually try not to stray above ISO 1000 during a wedding but occasionally the light levels are so low I have no choice. The above close-up comes from Laura and Paul's wedding last year at St George's Church in Deal and was taken at ISO 3200. Apparently more recent digital cameras (in particular the Nikon D3) are getting very good at reducing noise at high ISO settings but for the venerable Canon EOS 5D it clearly is an issue. Still at least you can get the shot - that's the most important thing.

All is not lost however - digital noise can be dramatically reduced. Both Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop have this facility but produce a rather unreal, "plasticky" effect. Much better is Neat Image which can be bought as a plug-in for Photoshop and which was used to clean up the above shot. I created a personalised noise profile for my 5D, to make it more accurate, and set up noise reduction and sharpening as a Photoshop droplet, to automate the process. Now all my images are cleaned and sharpened automatically. Very handy.

High-key portrait photography

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I had the pleasure of photographing Sia and her parents again on Sunday - click to see a selection from her portrait album. I took along my collapsible white background (which I have finally learnt how to fold back up again in less than 5 minutes) in order to take some high-key shots. Key refers to the dominant tonality in the photo, so high-key means predominantly white. In a studio setting this is often achieved by using two lights for the background, set to over-expose by at least one stop. You can cheat, however, under the right circumstances. In the shot above Sia is lit solely by window light. Rendering good skin tones is the key to portrait photography so I exposed the shot solely for her. Since the background is further from the light source it initially came out as off-white. I then just used Photoshop (the replace colour command) to select and lighten only the background - much quicker than setting up a light. Bear in mind that if your subject is very pale, or wearing very light clothes, distinguishing them from the background won't be so easy using Photoshop, so in that case it will be quicker to light the background separately.

New wedding photography equipment

I had the opportunity to try out some new equipment at Erina and Paul's wedding on Saturday. First up was a Custom Brackets digital Pro-M kit. This is an expensive, but superbly built, flash bracket that has been designed by someone who likes to take photographs. The headline feature is that the camera sits in a cradle which smoothly rotates between portrait and landscape formats, meaning the flash unit is always placed correctly for the shot. Other terrific features include padded grips in all the right places for holding the unit, a readily adjustable arm for tilting the flash forwards and two supports which can fold away and allow the unit to be placed upright. Absolutely fantastic.

I also trialled a Lastolite micro Apollo light modifier with a Speedlite 580 EX II. It's not as good at softening the light as my Lastolite EzyBox but it's still pretty good and it's considerably more portable. These items will be joining me at my next wedding shoot.

Both of these items were purchased from Speed Graphic who I can heartily recommend. They have a great selection of gear, knowledgeable staff and deliver quickly.

Wedding Photography at Whitstable, Kent

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I took this photo at Erina and Paul's wedding on Saturday. I wanted to capture detail in the very bright sky but without silhouetting them, so I decided to massively underexpose the sky and light them with flash. The constraints of the shot: time was limited (welcome to the world of wedding photography!) so I needed to use the Speedlite mounted on my camera (no time to set up a light off-camera) and several brightly coloured huts on the beach dictated my positioning of the couple. Since I knew I would need a lot of flash power to balance the very bright sky I needed to shoot slower than the X-sync speed (1/200 on an EOS 5D) - high speed flash sync allows you to use very fast shutter speeds but considerably reduces power output. No opportunity to underexpose by using a very fast shutter speed! I set the camera to ISO 50 and shot in manual mode. A shutter speed of 1/160 at f 5.6 gave me a good exposure for the sky (4 stops below the correct exposure for the couple which would have rendered the sky completely white). It took a couple of attempts to get an aperture that allowed me to light the scene with a single flash (I set it to overexpose by +1 stop) and get a shutter speed slower than the X-sync speed. Provided you're clear in your mind about what you need to achieve though you can set-up in less than a minute.

Portrait Photography Skills, part 1

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Good old window light provided the illumination for the shot of my daughter Emily above, see further pictures from this shoot in the April 2008 gallery, an east-facing window at about 11am, when no direct sunlight was streaming in. If your subject looks towards the light source then you get a catchlight in the eyes, which I think makes a huge improvement to a portrait. Having a neutral background also makes a big difference but don't forget to compensate for exposure if it's very light or dark.