Archive for the ‘Photography Tips’ Category

An interesting portrait

July 26, 2010

I took an interesting portrait shot of an aboriginal Australian while I was in Blue Mountain, few hours drive from Sydney. He was playing the ‘didjeridu’, which is an instrument that the aboriginals invented.

Well, I wanted a portrait of him with his instrument but it was quite challenging to get a well exposed picture of him as he was facing his face away from the sun. As seen in the picture below, the skin tone of the subjects are a little underexposed although the overall picture seems well exposed.

So what I did was I’d to reposition myself to a different angle where I don’t get too much sunlight directly into my lens. To brighten up the face, I had my SB900 flash fired at 1/2 of the power from the right side of the frame by using a wireless trigger. I set my aperture to around F9 to control the exposure of the light on the subjects.

I know I have a dirty sensor. You can see an obvious dot on my picture. I have already clean it and it’s something that photographers should pay attention to. You wouldn’t want your clients to see dots on their face (:

Lesson Learnt

November 29, 2009

This is one of the most fun photoshoot I had so far.

Just today I had an outdoor garden wedding to photograph. We were all geared up for the event…but..I don’t have a flash trigger! I lend my trigger to a friend and somehow it went missing. I wanted to get a replacement at the very last minute because I thought the lost trigger could be found, when I could just get a replacement much earlier. I called up the supplier and he said “Sorry boss..no stock!”

I was really disappointed with myself for not ordering a replacement earlier. Hence, I had no choise but to rely on Nikon’s Creative Lighting System (a sort off in-built flash trigger..too complicated to explain here). We had to test out the CLS system because sometimes the flash doesn’t fire.

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The setup

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Testing the flash with nikon’s CLS

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First test shot fail. Can see Zhi Fung clearly at the background. The thing with CLS, the flash infra-red detects signal from the camera’s pop-up flash. Too far, and it won’t fire. Too near..and this is what you get..get to see ZF clearly.

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To solve the problem, we tied it to the archway…something that shouldn’t be done in the future.

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Anyway, I had a good time today. Lesson learnt!

Learning Curve

October 23, 2009

I spent the whole morning learning up photoshop skills that can be implemented in pictures. This was what I came up with at the end of the morning

Before

PreShoot (16)

After

PreShoot (16)1 copy

How about that eh?