DanSel Photography | Malaysian Wedding Photographer » Photography Tips

Some high key portraits

Dansel — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 02:10:36 +0000

I’ve just finish editing the first batch of photos from the other day. What I really like from the first batch of photos are these two high key portraits of the couple.

Ooohhh! High key portrait does make me go a little crazy. I totally love how the high exposure background bleed through the picture. It does bring out the people in the photo a lot!

An interesting portrait

Dansel — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 10:47:54 +0000

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

Dansel — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 18:37:21 +0000

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.

The setup

Testing the flash with nikon’s CLS

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.

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

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

Learning Curve

Dansel — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 06:59:15 +0000

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

After

How about that eh?