The Giveaway!!

A lot of people will tell you that a good photograph must have a nice even histogram, this is a blatant lie & you must immediately set fire to who ever told you that. What you should do is think of a histogram as a light meter for after you’ve taken the shot — a light meter on a cocaine fuelled acid trip with a dab of heroine and a touch of speed.

Anatomy of a histogram — from left to right the histogram will tell you about the dark, mid & light content in your photo, and from top to bottom it will tell you how many pixels in your image are affected in that area.

When I review a photo, I am probably more interested in what the histogram tells me than what the image preview is trying to show me. I am not looking for a good or bad histogram, there is no such thing, I am looking for one that matches the style of photo I am going for. So I have put together a few examples of histogram shapes and the type of photos they might match up with.

So the next time you go out with your camera, try checking your histogram out after you’ve taken shot, hopefully it will give you a little more insight into how your photo has been exposed.

To get to your histogram on most Canon cameras you press the Info or Display button & on most Nikon cameras you press the up or down button when previewing an image to cycle through the different views.

Stay tuned for my next post “How I Shoot: A Lowkey Portrait” due out on the 26th May 2010!

So the new plan is to do several posts, a series if you will, each featuring a different style of portrait, all using off camera flash. I want to start simple so the first of these posts will be a one light portrait onto a perfect black background — not dissimilar to this one:

After the first post I will then continue to cover other styles like: low depth of field street portraits at night (my favourite kind!), crisp portraits on white, day time shots balanced with a flash — stuff like these:

I plan to publish the first post on the 26th of May, a few gentle nudges over the next 2 weeks would be appreciated. So how does the new plan sound? Is there anything specifically people would like to see that I haven’t mentioned already?

“Sometimes I stay up so late that I have my morning coffee before I go to bed.”

"If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light."

“No matter how far you have gone on the wrong road, turn back”

“A human being is only breath and shadow.”

"Shoot the kids and drown the neighbours! We’ve got a winner!"

"Tempers are wearing thin. Let’s hope some robot doesn’t kill everybody."

P.S. I know I haven’t been blogging as much as I should have been but I am back on it now! Promise!

I went to get the film processed as soon as I got back, but the labs I went to told me that they would have to be sent away & because of Christmas there would be a long wait. So I waited till post Christmas & took it into the Lincoln branch of Jessops. I thought taking it in after would minimise the delay & reduce the chance of them losing the film (Paranoid).

I kinda wish I hadn’t taken it to Jessops – it took them over 3 weeks to process it, they didn’t have a clue where my film was at any point and the staff were unhelpful when I was trying to get them to chase it for me.

I think it’s safe to say the development process of Delta 3200 has put me off shooting it for a while, back to the Fuji Xtra 400. I think I am so used to the speed and convenience of digital that if I can’t get a film developed & onto my computer within a day I can’t stand it! I think I am mumbling now, just check out the photos, let me know what you think:

It took some doing to convince myself to part with the amount of cash that an L series lens costs. I was eyeing up the 100mm f/2 USM (not the f/2.8 macro) and I probably would have been happy with that lens if I hadn’t tried out some L series glass in LCE. After that I knew I wouldn’t be settling for anything less.

I am SO glad I did make that jump, the Canon EF 135mm f/2 USM is an exceptionally sharp lens, I thought my 50mm f/1.4 USM was sharp, but it is blown away by this. Even wide open at F/2 it just blows my mind with the level of detail it picks up and the depth of field gets silly small. I took the shot below at f/4 and uploaded the full size image to show off the detail picked up, you should definatly check out the face area, you can see the texture in the paint, every speck of dust, all of it! Take note that this image is 2922px x 4386px and about 2mb eek, still go look at it.

This lens suites my style of shooting so well, if you have ever ventured onto my flickr you’ll have seen low DOF portraits with a healthy helping of bokeh, this lens is already helping me take that to the next level. I’ve only had it week but it has quite possibly ruined me for all other lenses. Telephoto Primes Rock My Socks!

My Tools

So these are the core tools that I have in my bag when I go out to do these sort of shots. I found it really hard to know what bits to pick up when I was getting into off camera flash photography so I wanna explain some of the options you have.

Lights

Aside from the camera arguably the most important part of the strobists tool kit. There are loads of options here depending on budget. I use the Canon 430ex, other options are the Canon 580ex, Nikon SB-900 Nikon SB-600, Nikon SB-24… the list goes on. Vivitar & Sunpak make some cheaper flash units that might be investigating if you are on a tight budget but you do get what you pay for. The key things you are looking for is that the power can be adjusted, you don’t need to worry about a flashes automatic capabilities, unless you are willing to part with some serious cash for the new Pocket Wizard ControlTL triggers, I shoot with all my flashes on full manual.

Triggers & Receivers

So really good triggers are really expensive, the real industry leaders here are Pocket Wizard – they are reliable & have an insane range. But they aren’t for me. I just can’t justify spending the amount of money on them that I would need to. A set of two go for £320 and you need one per flash and one for the camera, that would put me out £640 for me to run my current set up! I can’t justify that. I currently use the very cheap but popular PT-04 triggers, you can pick the newly designed ones up from amazon around £20 for a trigger & receiver kit. They do misfire some times & the range is no where near as good as the PWs but for the price they are great.

I have recently been looking at the Seculine Twinlink T2D kit, which seems to be something that fills the gap between the cheap triggers & the expensive ones. I think some time in the near future I will be making the upgrade to these.

Hotshoe With PC Port

I don’t connect my flash directly to the receiver, I actually sit my flash into a hotshoe with a PC port on the side, I then velcro my receiver to the top of my flash & run a cable. Mainly because I don’t trust the cheap plastic that the receivers are made from, I have already lost one flashgun because of it falling off a light stand, I don’t want to lose any more thank you very much. The hotshoes I have are made of metal and hardened plastic they also have a locking nut on them which means I can get them really tight on the light & umbrella bracket. They aren’t going anywhere! Mine are pretty similar to these bad boys but I sure as hell didn’t pay £10 each for them! I think they were around £2.50 each, totally worth it!

Light & Umbrella Bracket

This one is pretty easy, there are a few on the market, they all the do the same thing really. I have these ones, they hold an umbrella & a flash in place nicely but they do require that the flash, or hotshoe if you are using one, screw/lock in to be held securely in place.

Light Stand

Another straight forward one, you can’t really go wrong. As long as they go up to a decent height & aren’t going to fall over you are safe. I use the Konig brand ones which are available from Amazon for just under £12. But there are plenty of other options.

Update: This evening I put together a diy light stand out of some old bits I found in my dads garage, you can check it out here.

Umbrellas

Umbrellas get a little more complicated. Firstly the bigger the umbrella the more diffused the light will be. Secondly the bigger the umbrella the more power you will need to put through it. When using speedlights a good guide size to go for is between 60-100cm. There are 2 main types, shoot through and reflective, I like to keep both handy they are pretty inexpensive so it can’t hurt to have a seclection.

Shoot throughs are the white ones, you point the umbrella at the subject and pop. They also spill light everywhere though, so you don’t have quite as much control over the light, but it will spread it out better. This one would do a fine job.

Reflective umbrellas are the black ones, you point the umbrella away from the subject and the flash into the umbrella. Then the flash fires into the umbrella and all the light shines out, these will still give you the same soft light as a shoot through, but you can control where it goes a bit better. Something like this should do you.

Actually there is totally a third type, this is the kind I use pretty much all the time. I call them umbrella boxes, because they are sort of a softbox & an umbrella all rolled up into one – seriously awesome. I picked mine up from ebay & never looked back.

Camera & Lens

Use what you’ve got… that’s all there is to it. Nikon, Canon, Sony – whatever, it really doesn’t matter. As long as you’ve got a hotshoe on the top that you can get a trigger into then you are good to go. If you want to get a really dramatic bokeh effect though you are going to need a lens that hits the right sort of Fs! The lower the number the better the bokeh! Both Canon & Nikon produce a lens dubbed the nifty fifty, these are 50mm prime lenses that go down to F1.8 & retail for around £100. Really worth having in your camera bag.

Did you find this useful? Let me know by leaving a comment. Or maybe you use some different kit, I’d love to hear about it so get involved.