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

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.

Feedback from the Burlington Hotel

I wasn't intending to post any more HDR shots from the Burlington Hotel in Folkestone but I received such positive feedback from them today that I thought I'd share one more with you, along with the feedback.

The photos are FANTASTIC!!! Everyone here is over the moon with them - you are a genius!!

With kind regards,

Janice Whatton, Burlington Hotel

High praise indeed, but entirely justified in this instance! ;-)

I've started publishing feedback for all my photography on my website - photography testimonials.

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

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

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!