The main goal of this site is to help us all become better photographers, but as we all know there are so many different aspects of photography. We try and cover a broad range of topics and always look to have relevant information no matter what type of photography you specalize in. But to keep in tune with everyone ,we always want to hear directly from you and see what types of articles are most helpful to you. Please let us know below what types of articles would help you out the most in your photographic journey.

As a follow up to the article we did on “Long exposure photos“, I wanted to share some awesome examples of light painting. Light painting is the process of leaving your shutter open for a long period of time and “painting” in what you want to expose with a light (can be as simple as a flashlight) Light painting can come in many different forms, sometimes it is used to highlight certain parts of a building or landscape. Other times the light is used as a brush from a painter, the artists interact with the landscape and creates shapes and lines that create a piece of art.

Here are 10 amazing examples of light painting:

Light Painting in the New Year, originally uploaded by paulsweany

Volkswagen Scirocco 2.0 GT TSi (colour: Rising Blue), originally uploaded by AndWhyNot

Light painting #1, originally uploaded by CrowGirl

Light Painting #53 (Amaryllis), originally uploaded by citybumpkin

strength of magnetism, originally uploaded by { tcb }.

Beneath the party: driving, Audi A3 convertible, originally uploaded by AndWhyNot

violin light painting by onlinewoman

Gayundah by G a r r y

The Art of Light Painting by Ragstatic

light painting N°1 by Antoine et Alice

There are some very talented artists in this field right now and a movie being made about some of them. We interviewed the director of Luminary a little while back and will post that interview soon.

Do you have any great light painting photos you have taken? Share them with us, just add a link to the photo in our comments.

Here are a few more of your questions from twitter, keep them coming these are great! If you aren’t following us on twitter, check us out here: http://www.twitter.com/digitalphotobuz. Also you can view our last series of Q and A here: Photographer’s Questions and Answers

Okay, I have another question I was wondering how do you take pictures in direct sunlight? I’m not sure if it’s exactly direct sunlight. Here are some examples: 1. http://bit.ly/74d2d4 2. http://bit.ly/7Mjgq6 3. http://bit.ly/6PujaN 4. http://bit.ly/6dU36A

These shots or type of look are actually fairly simple from a lighting perspective. They are shots done in the full sun only with available light that is at the subjects back.
If you want some lens flare in the shot the sun has to be low enough to be included in the frame. The main part about getting a shot with this feel to it is getting your exposure right, you have to zoom in tight on the subject and get your exposure. Then lock that in or set your camera to manual at that exposure. That way the brightness of the background won’t fool your camera’s meter. You want the subject to be exposed correctly and then the background can blow out.

Here is a shot I recently did with this type of backlight (you can also see a article we have on backlighting here: Getting creative with natural light

The other part to these images is in the post production. In the example I have above I wanted that beautiful yellow light to really shine and add a glow to the image so I actually enhanced the color and saturation slightly. In the images referenced in the question you would want to bring down your saturation, look at the models skin tone in the examples. The color is very muted. So to get this just bring down your saturation (you might want to also tweek the levels or curves to get the contrast to your liking)
Here is the same shot above but taking the saturation down a bit:

Omg where do I start. Can u make eyes pop if u didn’t shoot in raw?

Making someone’s eyes pop really isn’t a question of RAW vs Jpeg, its really in the lighting of the shot. Shooting in RAW in my opinion is always a good idea, you are capturing all of the possible data with your camera instead of having your camera compress the photo and basically throw away data. Also as technology improves and RAW processing gets better you can always go back to your RAW files and improve them if needed. With the low cost of hard drives I always suggest shooting in RAW.

But back to the original question about making the eyes pop. You can always go into a shot in photoshop and try and lighten up the eyes to make them pop better but its always best to get the lighting right during the shoot so the eyes already have a pop to them. The most common mistake I see with some portraits is having the subjects in too dense of shade with no fill light.

Try and use a reflector to bounce some light back to your subject and fill in their eyes or use an external light for a little added fill.

We appreciate your comments and keep those questions coming! You can always leave questions in the comment field below (which we do respond to all comments) or send me a twitter message.

The couple, originally uploaded by AndWhyNot.

This is such a great portrait that I came across on Flickr awhile back. I think its a great example of a really unique portrait that combines a lot of perfect lighting skills. This was taken with a camera mounted on the cars hood as the car was moving with a long shutter speed. Its a really cool mix of light painting (having a long shutter speed and letting light create interesting shapes and compositions) and a portrait lit with strobes.

Lighting Info: diffused SB-600 in car dead centre between camera and models; bare SB-800 dead centre behind models for rim.
Moving car, 30sec, straight out of camera

This really inspired me to look more info Light painting and I have found some awesome artists online that are creating some really cool work in this field. I’ll share some of them and the work they are doing over the next few weeks, along with an interview with a filmmaker who is doing an entire documentary on Light painting.

What do you think of this shot? Would love to hear your comments. Also if you do any light painting photography please share your link in the comments I would love to see your work!

The photo of the week this week is another off camera lighting example. So many times when shooting weddings you don’t have the time to get all of the shots you would like of the bride and groom during the day. At night there can be so many really creative things you can do by adding just a few lights to the scene.

At this particular wedding there was a cool walkway that was lined with trees. During the day it just looked decent but I knew that it could really look spectacular at night. The lighting was actually pretty simple for this and depending on the angle that we shot at were able to get a few very different looking images without taking up a lot of time. For these types of shots I usually pull the bride and groom off the dance floor for a minute and don’t want to take up a lot of their fun reception time so try and keep the shoot under 5 minutes.

There were 4 lights for the shot, 2 quantum Q-Flash that were near the end of the walkway at full power. These were at the edge of the walkway pointing back towards the center of the image and pointing up to light up the tree’s. Since they were pointing up and in from opposite sides of the walkway they created some cool cross lighting on the trees. There was also a small vivitar Vivitar 285HV Auto Professional Flash that was to the left of the couple. If you look at the tree to the far left of the shot there was a vivitar hidden behind that tree pointed towards the couple. This was set to 1/2 power and gave that nice highlight along the back of the bride.

The main light was a Alien bee B800 with a medium softbox at about 30 degrees to the right of the camera. Since we moved the bride and groom around for a few different poses the main light was setup to be a fairly flat light, that way we could move them around a little bit and still have good light on them. If you are only going to put them into one position try moving the light a little more to the side to create a more dramatic directional light.

Here are a few other variations of this lighting setup. You can move the lights in the back to be behind the trees, that way they won’t show up in the shot but still create that cool cross light for the trees. Also check out the great shadow that the light in the back creates on the tree leading right up to the bride and groom.

Or you can also include both of those lights in the background in the shot. I personally like to include the lights in the shot sometimes and think it add some visual interest to the image.

Do you have an amazing image you are proud of and want to share with everyone? Click the contact button above and send us a message, we would love to have one of your shots as our photo of the week. Also if you have any questions, comments or feedback leave a comment below. I would love to know what you think of this image (the good or bad) what would you do to improve it?

I am still working on my full canon 7d review, but in the meantime have a few more tests shots I would like to share and another ISO comparison vs the 5d (not the mark II the first Canon 5d). In my first review (Canon 5d vs Canon 7d) I had the noise reduction set to normal for the 7d, which resulted in some soft images when viewing a small detail of the shot. In these tests the 7d has the noise reduction set to off. These were also shot at jpeg files with no post production done to them (other than sizing down for the web). Setting the noise reduction to off definitely made a difference in sharpness and the files are not that noisy. I would prefer to shoot with the noise reduction off and if noise needs to be removed in post production would rather do that than try and add sharpening to an image.

Here is a detail of the cameras at a 100% crop shot at ISO 1600.

canon 5d at ISO 1600

Canon 7d at ISO 1600

The 7d in this test is actually sharper than the 5d was.

Here is a breakdown of different ISO’s all shot at the same exact settings. Click on each image for a larger photo.

The camera does very well at high ISO’s. Here are a few more images all taken at 3200 in bad light with no corrections other than sizing down for the web.

If you are looking to get a 7d, Amazon has great prices on them: Canon EOS 7D

We got some great comments and questions via twitter the last few weeks and I want to answer them all here. Remember to shoot us over any questions or what you would like to learn more about with your photography by commenting on any post or send us a message via twitter (http://twitter.com/digitalphotobuz).

Here are some of the great questions everyone had:

Is the “tabbed” layout I see in CS4 an option in CS3?
Unfortunately no, the “tabbed” layout of CS4 was a brand new feature to CS4. For those who don’t know about the tabbed feature it’s a way to organize all of your open windows in Photoshop and merge them into one window that is tabbed (kind of like most browsers now). CS3 doesn’t have anyway of merging your windows into one view.

Why use Lightroom instead of Photoshop? What’s the difference? Can’t I make the adjustments in Ps than Lr?
Speed is really the key to using Lightroom vs. Photoshop. For my workflow (and going through thousands of images per week) I need to be able to go through and do some adjustments to all images that I shoot in a quick way but still having a lot of control over the image. Lightroom lets me edit about 95% of what I shoot and then when I really need to do a lot of work to an image I will open it up in Photoshop. Since lightroom doesn’t have the concept of layers to a file it is somewhat limited but most of my shots don’t need a lot of layers to get the results I am looking for.

Lightroom is a full featured image editor, and with lightroom 2.0 and above you can even do localized adjustments to your photo.
For each shoot we import into lightroom and then can do many adjustments (the same type of adjustments as you can in photoshop just in a much faster method). Normally I will adjust exposure, shadows/highlights, brightness, contrast, and a few other things for each image and then save as a JPEG file. I can go through a few hundred images in just about 20 minutes so much faster than a photoshop workflow.

Here are some of the main features of lightroom 2:

Also check out a great video on Lightroom’s develop module:

  
Is it possible to add blur to a certain zone in a picture using lightroom 2.5? Like using a mask or a layer in Photoshop?
You can do localized adjustments in lightroom 2.5 like using a mask in Photoshop. Most of the local adjustments you will do are with exposure, if you want to lighten or darken a certain part of an image Lightroom’s adjustment brush really works great. Lightroom’s adjustment brush basically lets you paint in a mask on the photo so you can make changes to just one specific part of the image and not effect the rest of the photo. Here are the different things you can adjust with the adjustment brush:

There isn’t a blur tool in Lightroom so if you want to blur out a certain area of a image I would still use Photoshop to have the most control. One way to get a similar effect in lightroom is to use the adjustment brush and move the clarity down real low which will in turn blur out the image. Here is a photo where I used the adjustment brush to paint around the edges of the image. Then I moved the Clarity slider in the adjustment brush menu down to 0. Here is the before and after photo:

There are a few more great questions that came in that we will answer soon!

– Mark

We have received a few requests for posts dealing with white balance and it seems like there is a lot of confusion around this topic. The white balance in your camera is its way of trying to figure out the color temperature of the light when you are shooting each image. Most cameras come with a few standard settings for your white balance; Auto, Daylight, Cloudy, Shade, Florescent, Tungsten, Kelvin, Flash and Custom. Getting your white balance correct (and even knowing what should be correct) can be a very detailed and tricky task. There is lots of science behind it, but we will give you a simple yet full explanation of white balance and some ways to help get a good image in camera.

First let me start off by saying just like most other parts of photography the “Correct” white balance is always in the eyes of the beholder. While here is a true reading for white, your personal preference might be a little warmer tone to your images. Or you might prefer a cool or cyan tone to your images, the main thing to always keep in mind is this question, “does the color in the images distract your eye or add to the story of the shot”. The eel of the shot should always be accentuated by the color temperature of the image.

With that being said, how you shoot each image will greatly help your post production time and make things much, much easier on you in the long run. There are a couple of different ways to think about white balance and before we get into the details on how to get the balance right here is a quick overview of color temperature.

Color temperature is the spectrum of light which is radiated from a “blackbody” with that surface temperature. A blackbody is an object which absorbs all incident light– neither reflecting it nor allowing it to pass through. Higher color temperatures (5,000 K or more) are cool (blueish white) colors, and lower color temperatures (2,700–3,000 K) warm (yellowish white through red) colors. Color temperature is measured in Kelvin degrees (K)

Here is a list of some common light sources and their color temperature.

Temperature —–> Typical Sources
1000K —–> Candles; oil lamps
2000K —–> Very early sunrise; low effect tungsten lamps
2500K —–> Household light bulbs
3000K —–> Studio lights, photo floods
4000K —–> Clear flashbulbs
5000K —–> Typical daylight; electronic flash
5500K —–> The sun at noon
6000K —–> Bright sunshine with clear sky
7000K —–> Slightly overcast sky
8000K —–> Hazy sky
9000K —–> Open shade on clear day
10,000K —–> Heavily overcast sky
11,000K —–> Sunless blue skies

Setting your camera to the correct white balance (or doing a custom white balance) can save you hours and hours of time in post production. There are really two different approaches to getting a good white balance. The first is to use one of the cameras preset modes. These normally will get you pretty close to where you want to be and with a little photoshop or lightroom work you can fine tune it to be perfect. If you are shooting in a consistent light then doing a batch adjustment in bridge or lightroom is very easy. Here is an example of a shot with the same exact settings shot with different white balance points in the camera.

Look at this next shot taken with the same exact settings on auto. There were a few minor changes with people in the background and that made the camera change its white balance. This is the main reason why I never suggest to shoot in Auto, your white balance will be different in every photo and doing the post production will take a lot more time.

For setting a custom white balance there are a few different ways to do that and many tools available on the market. I’ll address this in another post coming up. Any questions or comments leave them below!

We have focused  a few posts so far on getting creative with off camera lighting at night or indoors but haven’t spoke about natural light yet.  You can get just as creative with natural light as you can with off camera light (and can use the sun not only as a main light but as a backlight or side accent light).   There are many ways that we use the sun in a creative way.  One way that I love to shoot that really goes well with my photography style is to use the sun as a backlight, getting just the right angle of the sun you get this awesome lens flare coming across the image.  The sun has to be pretty low for this to work and the exposure should be manually set.  Setting your exposure to auto will really underexpose the subjects faces especially if there is a lot of the sky in the image that will really effect your exposure.  The easiest way to get the right exposure for your subject is just zoom in on their face and lock in that exposure to your camera. Some photographers really like this look and it fits their style others don’t, but next time you are out shooting with the sun low try it out. It never hurts to try something out if you have time and you might really love the results.

This can work great around sunset, a lot of times with the beautiful golden sunset hour you want to have your subjects basking in that awesome light.

That can always work good and we often get shots with our clients in that golden light.  But after we get the safe and beautiful shots then we have fun for a minute and try and get some different images.

Here is a quick example of having the sun come in from behind your subject.

Also look out for our next shot of the week where we will look at a shot with a similar feel to it and go over more of the technical details to the shot.

One of the easiest ways to make an impact on your images in photoshop is a good old technique that has been used for years in the darkroom. Dodging and burning are basically just methods of adding or subtracting light to your images that can really help you guide the viewers eye through your photo. It is a simple method but can make a very dramatic effect in your work. Here is a quick walk though of an image.

We will start with an outdoor shot at the pumpkin patch since today is Halloween:

We will start with an image right out of the camera, it was taken in partial sunlight and overall has a pretty flat light to the subject and the scene. Notice how the background being bright really captures your attention more than it should. The main focus here should be on the child not all of the bright pumpkins in the background.

The first thing I am going to do before dodging and burning is do some quick overall adjustments. The exposure is off a bit on the image and its a little too bright so i’ll start by adjusting the brightness a bit and tone it down.

Then I will start darkening the areas that are a little too bright and distracting. I’ll start with the hay on the very bottom of the screen. In photoshop i’ll use the burn tool and set the exposure to somewhere between 15 and 20%, the brush will be set to a hardness of 0 so it feathers off and i’ll adjust the brush size as needed for where I am painting in the light.

After the hay I will burn in the background. For this I always start on the edges and since I am using a brush with a low exposure (around 15%) I will paint the light back in with a few strokes. Each time I use this tool it gradually darkens the photo and I keep building it up until I think it looks good for my style. I like a pretty dramatic look to my images and do like the background and edges usually burned in pretty heavy, you might not like this look so just burn it in until it works for you.

I think the background looks pretty good now so we can move on to the next step. The lighting on the subjects face is OK, but flat and a little bit dark. I want to add some highlights to her face to make the image look more dimensional. So I will lighten it up a bit. I’ll use the dodge tool to lighten up select parts of the face. I’ll start with the right side of her face and with a small brush lighten the side of her face, i’ll also lighten up her eyes and chin a bit. I’ll use a smaller brush and only work on certain parts of the faces to try and bring some extra dimension to the photo.

And finally while we are working on the face i’ll bring out the stamp tool and remove the little red rash by her mouth.

The very last step I will finalize the curves and contrast to give it just a little more pop. Here is a comparison from the first to last revision so you can see the difference together. I also did one final revision at the end with even more of a burn around the edges. See how your focus goes on the subject as the edges and background get darker and darker.

Questions? Comments? Let us know. We will reply to all comments below and love your feedback.