Tag Archives: Christmas

Night HDR

03 Tuesday Jan 2012

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When looking at HDR photography, I often found the night photos to be the most impressive. Well, I recently did it for the first time. It is way cool, but there are a few oddities compared to doing it in the daytime to watch out for.

My biggest suggestion is to use live view and manual exposure. With the 5dII at least, the camera I was using. If you dial in a lot of exposure compensation for your base exposure it sort of squeezes the range it can shoot in the Auto Exposure Bracketing sequence. Shooting manual does away with this problem. So I set a manual exposure using exposure simulation in live view. I set the f/stop to f/16 and adjusted the shutter speed to fit as much of the values into one histogram as I could. I then set the sequence to two stops each over and under.

The other oddity here is that the shutter speeds are so long, that it’s hard to keep track of where you are in the sequence, etc. I had a moment when I thought my camera was malfunctioning, when all that was wrong was I had locked the button of my release down.

In post processing I loaded the images into Nik Software’s HDR Efex Pro. Can’t tell you a whole lot more as I processed each image differently.

Give this night HDR thing a try, the results are wonderful.

Handheld Night Event Photography

02 Monday Jan 2012

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Recently, two different Christmas parades were presented in the Salem area that I wanted to photograph for stock. Both highlighted lights as the main attraction, thus they happened at night. I’ve always found events like this to work best when I photograph handheld. So, I needed to come up with a technique for this.

Here’s what I came up with. Arrive before the event starts, and when the ambient light approaches the level it will be during the event, run some experiments. Set your exposure on manual mode and ISO to one of your highest settings, I used 6400 on my 5d II for these images. Then mess around until you get the glow to the lights you want in the images. You should probably check the display occasionally, adjustments might be advisable through the night.

I was quite pleased with the results I achieved with this technique.

Check back tomorrow, when I show you some stuff I did from a tripod the night of the boat parade.

Holiday Pet Portraits

28 Friday Oct 2011

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I know it may be a bit early for a tip like this, but the tips I’m going to give will work with any holiday.

Step one is to find accessories for your pet that you feel fairly certain the pet will tolerate. Here I chose two different collars, one was jingle bells and the other looks like a wreath.

Second get one of your pet’s favorite treats to place them where you’d like them and get them to look where you’d like. In this case, we used hard boiled eggs. Tawny loves eggs of any type and recognizes the word too, just like me. You will need a handler to help you with this. I actually used two, one to get the dog where I needed her and the other to aim the light.

Speaking of the light, I used a speedlight in a Lastolite softbox. Try to place it as close to the pet as possible for maximum softness to the light.

Third, place the pet so that there are some holiday specific items in front of and/or behind the pet. I usually have these items slightly out of focus, but still recognizable. Balance the flash exposure with the ambient such that you can see the holiday items, but the focus is on the pet.

Finally, in post processing, process like you would most portraits. Make sure to use a vignette to further emphasize the pet.