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Franklin Wang is a professional accountant (CGA) and an avid photographer specializing in nature, landscape, travel, and candid. He is based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. To see his latest work, click here.
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Category Archives: Tips and Techniques
Tips for Shooting Fireworks
The Victoria Day long weekend in Canada marks the beginning of an all summer long firework displays in Niagara Falls, Ontario. Every Friday, Sunday, and holiday between May 18 and September 2, the sky above the Falls will be lit up by beautiful fireworks. The photo above was taken last night, the opening night of the longest running fireworks series in Canada.
If you are planning to go out and photograph fireworks this weekend, you may find the simple tips below helpful in getting great results. For a photo like the one above, you will need the following settings:
- Put your camera in Manual (“M”) shooting mode. Many compact cameras come with M shooting mode, so you don’t need to have a DSLR to follow this recipe. The photo above was taken with my point-and-shoot Canon PowerShot G12.
- Use a tripod. To capture the light trails, you will need to expose for a few seconds. Without a tripod, you will end up with blurry pictures.
- Set the aperture to f/5.6
- Set the shutter speed to 5 seconds
- Set the ISO speed to 200
These settings are good for images with both foreground and background elements, but they are just a starting point. I usually monitor the results during the shoot, and adjust the settings accordingly. I usually reduce the shutter speed to 3 seconds and ISO speed to 100 towards the end when the explosions are more rapid.
(To my Canadian friends, do you know that Nova Scotia is the only province or territory not to count Victoria Day as holiday?)
Get Closer to the Light
Light is probably is the most important ingredient that can make an OK picture a good picture and a good picture a great picture. After all, photography is a process of recording light. Without light, we would not be taking pictures.
I have been reading a fair bit on lighting techniques from online resources like SpeedLighter.ca and Digital ProTalk, and I wanted to put some of this knowledge to practice. I asked my trusted and willing models to stand in our kitchen next to a big window. I then asked them to turn slightly in either directions to refine the direction of light. After a few tries, I was able to get the effect that I was after – directional light on my subject.
Like me, if you want to make your pictures of family and friends look better, move your subject closer to a light source. You will immediately see a difference.
The Hot Spot
I made this image late in the afternoon a couple of weeks ago. With the sun light coming from the side, I knew I had to make a choice of protecting the highlight and ending up with dark faces, or catching the expressions on the children’s faces and letting the highlight go. Alternatively, I could have used flash to fill in the shadow and balance the exposure, but it wasn’t really an option because the moment would have been gone by the time I had the flash set up.
Personally, I really don’t mind the blown out highlight in this image. I think it helps to shape Jesse’s face and draw the viewer’s attention to the intimate moment between the siblings. So having the hot spot is not a bad thing in the right situations.
Courting Peacock – A Hit and A Miss
Don’t be misled by the title. It is not in reference to the behaviour of the peafowl. Rather, it is in reference to the softness of the first image. Look closely at the image and you will see that the eye of the peahen is not crystal clear. With all the advanced technologies built into today’s cameras, one would think that getting a sharp picture is just a matter of point and shoot. But it is not always the case.
The problem with the first image is that the sophisticated auto focusing system of my camera assumes that the subject closest to the camera (the peahen’s left wing in this case) is where I wanted to focus, and that logics didn’t work for me in this image and would not work in many other situations. Using just one focus point with auto focus tracking off, I was able to achieve a better result with the second image. The point here is that setting your camera to auto everything may not be a good thing. Learning what each feature or mode does, and be able to turn it on or off in different situations is crucial to capturing the desired result.
From a story telling standpoint, I think the first image is a much better image. I could only wish that I could retake the picture.
Cherry Blossoms in Black & White
I have never thought of creating flower images in black and white, because whenever I think of flowers I think of their vibrant colours. But for whatever reason, when I was testing the new Topaz B&W Effects, a black and white converter, I decided to try it out with this image of cherry blossoms. Needless to say, I was pleasantly surprised by the end result.
Just a few words on the Topaz B&W plug-in for Photoshop. Topaz has got a winner. At just US $59.99, it is $140 less than the leading B&W converter Nik Silver Efex Pro, but it gives similar controls over exposure and details enhancement, colour toning, and film grain simulation. With this image of cherry blossoms, I just picked one of the presets, and then used the basic exposure controls to increase the brightness slightly and boost the white colour slightly for that dreamy effect.
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