Bokeh what?

Bokeh. Pronounced Bow-Kah, emphasis on Bow, a Japenese word (allegedly) meaning “blur” or “haze”. Photographers use the word to describe the quality of the out-of-focus areas of an image created by a lens using a shallow depth of field, as in “that lens has some great bokeh”. For an example, check out the image below; the bokeh is found behind and to the right of Jamie, the circular spots of light reflecting off the trees.

All lenses have a different bokeh effect and some photographers can get really obsessive over it. Which is good, because then they usually upload their tests and findings on bokeh to the web for all of us to enjoy, like this guy. Yay for obsessive photographers combined with the power of internet!

Happy shooting from Vantage!

Related posts:

1. Tuesday Tidbit: Understanding Aperture and Shutter Speed
2. Tuesday (Ok, Wednesday) Tidbit: What’s that flower for?
3. Tuesday Tidbit: Painting with Light

Have you ever noticed that some of your pictures have more noise (ugly colored speckles) than others? What’s up with that, right?

ISO is what’s up with that

ISO (also known as film speed….even though many of us don’t use film anymore) was created by the International Standards Organization in order to establish a standard way of identifying how sensitive a roll of film is to light. Film with an ISO of 200 is half as sensitive to light as film with an ISO of 400. ISO 100 film is a quarter as sensitive as ISO 400 film. Great, you say, so what does that mean in the real world? Well, it means that the higher the ISO number, the more sensitive the film is to light….which means, all other things equal like aperture and shutter speed (definitions found here), you need half the light at ISO 400 that you do at ISO 200 to create a properly exposed image. The higher the ISO, the less light you need.

Awesome. So what?

Even though film is going the way of the dinosaurs, it’s still an important concept to know. Our digital cameras are still sensitive to light…in microchip form. So if you’re taking a picture in low light, your digital camera is going to automatically kick up the ISO to increase the sensor’s sensitivity to light (or, if you’re an SLR user and it’s not in automatic ISO mode, you have to adjust the ISO yourself).

And the problem is?…….

Well, there’s one major snag. The higher the ISO you use, the more noise that appears in your image. Now I’m not going to get into why because, frankly, Michael (my dear hubby) has explained it to me two or three times already and I still don’t fully understand it enough to explain it properly to you all. Suffice it to say that a higher ISO=more noise and that, in most cases, more noise=not good. How’s that for a simplistic explanation?? :)

In order to prevent that noise from occurring, you either need to a) dial down the ISO on your camera or b) if you can’t do that, add more light (turn on a light or your camera’s flash) so the ISO automatically goes down.

If you absolutely can’t avoid high ISOs and noise, and you absolutely must use the image you took, there is hope. There are several programs out there, some better than others, that will remove the noise from the image after you’ve created it (we use NoiseNinja). There are drawbacks to the programs and it’s not ideal, but it can save an otherwise unusable image.

Happy shooting from Vantage!

Related posts:

1. Tuesday Tidbit: Understanding Aperture and Shutter Speed
2. Tuesday Tidbit: Point-and-shoot and SLR cameras. Say what??
3. Tuesday Tidbit: Painting with Light

So, taking better pictures in low light situations with a point and shoot camera (see the definition of a point and shoot here). There’s a short answer and a long answer…

The short answer: Put your camera on the “Party” or “Indoor” setting and shoot away.

The longer (and, imho, the more interesting) answer: For most of you, this low light situation probably means taking pictures at a party, when you’re out at dinner, etc. And in most cases, the camera flash probably simply pops up (or turns on), you take the picture and it looks like someone’s pointing a flashlight at you, right? (Some affectionately call this the “deer in the headlights” look) The reason for this effect is that the shutter is not remaining open long enough to allow enough ambient light in. The only light registering in the camera is coming from the camera’s flash, hence the flashlight effect. Get it? Flash, light, flashlight. :) I’m a dork.

The basics

I talked about the how shutter speed works back in March (you can read that post here). Here’s the basics of what you need to know: The length of time the shutter is open determines how much light can come into the lens. If the shutter is open for 1/400 of a second, you’ve allowed light into your lense for 1/400 of a second. If it’s a bright sunny day, that’ll be just fine for a properly exposed image. In the case of a darkened room and no extra light source, however, you’ll need your shutter open anywhere between 1/16 of a second and five minutes (or longer) to suck enough light into the lens to see anything worth seeing! And unless you have a tripod, that’s going to result in a blurry (and unusable) image. In the case of the image below (taken by my husband Michael in Jordan), he used a tripod and left the shutter open for a long time (I’d guess a few minutes) since the only ambient light was coming from the stars and a city far far faaaaaar off in the distance.

So, you want to take a picture but don’t have a tripod or the patience to wait for that dern shutter.

Enter the flash

Camera flash adds light to the environment, meaning that the shutter doesn’t need to be open so long to get a properly exposed image. Problem is, in a dark environment, the flash on that little camera isn’t bright enough to light up the whole room (or, in the case of the photo above, the Jordanian desert). To correct for that, we have to set up the camera to keep the shutter speed open longer so the camera can “collect” enough ambient light to properly expose the background but not so long as to overexpose the main subject…or at least the flash can’t be so powerful as to overexpose the main subject….yada yada yada. Here’s where it gets super technical here and I’m not going to go all into how the camera does it (or how you would do it manually). Suffice it to say that here’s where a little knowledge of what your camera can do really comes in handy.

Know thy camera

In the case of your point-and-shoot camera, you’re probably not going to be able to set it up manually and override the camera’s internal light readings. However, there are (usually) preset lighting/exposure settings built into your camera that will (as best as possible) optimize the shutter speed/flash combo for the best exposed image. On our point and shoot (a Canon PowerShot SD850 IS), we have several options for the situation, with the following settings in an average lighted room, all f-stop 2.8 (definition of f-stop here):

“Indoor” – 1/60 second

“Night Snapshot” – 1/10 second

“Fireworks” – 2 seconds

In these cases, the camera has decided what the shutter speed should be; in each case, the time the shutter is open increases as the environment gets darker (fireworks, I assume, is set up for a night time scene with….fireworks. Right.)

Practice makes perfect

Next time you have your camera out, take a look at the settings available to you and do some experimenting. In most dark environment cases (in which you’re taking pics of people), something like “Night snapshot” will be your best option. The shutter is open long enough to get some ambient light in (avoiding the deer in the headlights look) but not so long that everything has a ghostly blur to it.

Happy shooting from Vantage! And keep those suggestions coming!

Related posts:

1. Tuesday Tidbit (on Wednesday): The wonders of shutter speed (and a cool trick!)
2. Tuesday Tidbit: Point-and-shoot and SLR cameras. Say what??
3. Tuesday Tidbit: Action Shots

Images are created by recording the amount of light that falls onto the film or the digital sensor of a camera. The lens of the camera gathers the light reflected off a subject, converges it at a point on the focal plane, inverts the image and the light travels to the sensor of the camera, creating an exposed image of the subject.

Aperture: A camera lens has not only glass we see at the front of the lens but also an aperture that narrows and widens to control how much light enters the lens. The aperture is like the iris of our eyes–a bigger aperture lets more light in, a smaller aperture lets less light in.

The shutter: Look at the image above and imagine there is a door immediately in front of the camera sensor. By controlling how long that door (the shutter) is open, we can control the amount of time the film/sensor is exposed to the light coming through the aperture. Like a door of a house being open to the outside world, the longer the shutter is open, the more light is cast on the film/sensor.

How Aperture and Shutter Speed work together: The best way I’ve ever heard this described is in John Hedgecoe’s The New Manual of Photography. Hedgecoe writes: “The exposure process is like filling a glass with water. The glass is the film (or digital chip) and the water is the light. To fill the glass (expose the film), the faucet is turned on partially or fully (the aperture)–the amount affects how long the tap needs to run before teh glass is full (the shutter speed).” In other words, a wider aperture requires a shorter shutter speed to correctly expose the image in the camera; a narrower aperture requires a longer shutter speed.

Next Tuesday, we’ll talk about the affects you can get from having a wider or narrower aperture.

Related posts:

1. Tuesday Tidbit: Depth of Field
2. Tuesday Tidbit (on Wednesday): The wonders of shutter speed (and a cool trick!)
3. Tuesday Tidbit: Point-and-shoot and SLR cameras. Say what??