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!

When 6pm rolled around I don’t think any one was expecting the amount of people that turned up! It was nuts, all the Droplets sold out in 58 minutes! Fifty Fifty was jam packed as was the gallery downstairs.

Anyway, the real reason you are here is to see the photos I took right? Yeah, I thought so. I took around 200 which I will try and get up in some sort of gallery this week, but for now here are some of my favourite shots.

I had an awesome day, & it was good to put some faces to names, I didn’t manage to say hi to everyone but it’s not personal, I was busy taking photos! :P

Keep your eyes on my flickr for more uploads.

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.

On the 2nd of January 2009, being freshly paid for a freelance project, I wandered down to my local branch of LCE to see what they had on offer. Lucky for me they had just the camera I wanted, a Canon 450D with the 18-55 kit lens, I also managed to get them to throw in a Canon 430ex Speedlite for a very reasonable price. It wasn’t until this day that it crossed my mind to do a 365 project. I thought it would be a great way to keep the camera in my hand & speed up the learning process. Conveniently I had been taking some photos the day before on my FX-30, meaning I could run my 365 from January 1st to December 31st (It just felt right).

I instantly fell in love with my new 450D, she went every where with me & it didn’t take me long to start picking up extra bits for her, like the Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens & grip. Around February I found myself getting a hunger for a film camera, I got a 35mm Fisheye Lomo for my birthday & on the 20th of February I picked up a 1983 Canon AE-1 from a camera stall at a local market. Shooting film is fantastic, I realised how much it makes you value each photo. I think I soon translated that, at least to some degree, to my digital photography.

It also didn’t take me long to get interested in off camera flash, aka Strobist photography. I’m a bit of a control freak, so being able to set up all the light in a scene really appealed to me. But holy shit, that stuffs confusing for a n00b! Seriously, I spent hours & hours reading EVERYTHING I could find on the internet trying to make sense of any of it. There is certainly a lot more information about it on the web now than there was 10 months ago. The first product to aid my strobist adventure was the Canon ST-E2, which is an infrared transmitter capable of firing any of the current range of Canon speedlites while retaining the ETTL system. I quickly found that the ST-E2 (That name just rolls off the tongue) was quite limiting, being infrared it relies on line-of-sight & it doesn’t have a huge amount of range.

So I did some more research & got some radio transmitters, these gave me range but meant that I had to run any flashes on manual. That was ok, at this point I was already making sure I was taking every photo with my camera on full manual. Manual equals control, Rick likes that, in fact now when I use my ST-ET I use the flash on manual just to get that extra level of control. Light stands & light modifiers were the next logical step for me, umbrellas made the most sense as they were easy to get hold of & affordable. Since then I’ve had quite a few different umbrellas but recently I picked up some pretty large umbrella boxes which I really love. They like a softbox, but in umbrella form — awesome.

At the beginning of June an old family friend, who just happens to be a photographer, invited me out to a studio shoot he was doing. He also said that if brought someone pretty there would be time to set up the studio lights & shoot them. I knew just the person, my friend Leah, she’d done some modelling in past & one of her friends is a make up artist. They both came along & we had a really great time. I learnt loads & got some nice shots. It really whet my appetite for portrait photography – who would have thought, someone as antisocial as me would love taking photos of people as much as I do.

I never really intended to shoot live music, the thought hadn’t even entered my mind, until my friend Sarge rang me about Groomfest (An annual Lincoln music festival). He was quite insistent that I would shoot it… & you don’t say no to Sarge. It was a two day event at a local pub, a big marquee was set up in the car park with a stage. Some 25 bands performed – I shot them all. For my first time shooting music I was pretty happy with myself, or as happy as I get, I actually really enjoyed it & since have shot quite a lot of music locally.

About two thirds of the way through the year things started to become very hard work so I tried to give the project more structure by mixing in smaller projects, the first of which was Project 50 which I did with one of my bimbo gal pals we even made a website after we completed it – Fifty Of Fifty. I also did a week of self portraits. Which was harder work than you might think, not only was it a challenge to set the camera up, with lighting, focus etc… but it was also a challenge for me to step to the other side of the lens, I wasn’t the biggest fan of having my photo taken but now I’m pretty ok with it.

I also started a non time line based set which I am calling “Quotos“. I love photography & I love typography combining the two made a lot of sense. I was planing on doing a Quoto for my final photo, but it didn’t work out. A set I will be continuing to expand, at a steady rate, for the foreseeable future.

In October I made the decision to swap my Canon 450D to a prosumer level Canon 50D. Don’t get me wrong the 450D is a great camera & I would recommend it to anyone getting into photography but I felt I would benefit from the upgrade. The 50D has a much better sensor, handles low light better, bla bla bla the list goes on & I am really happy with it, well until I can get my hands on a 5D MkII.

The whole project has been incredibly hard work, motivation has probably been my biggest enemy in this. It is so hard to take a consistantly good photo day after day, it’s even harder to come up with that photo. My 2nd has been time – when I am busy with work, or have other things on it’s amazing how quickly the day can escape you. Sometimes I ended up with a slightly sub par photo, but I still somehow managed to hit that shutter button every day.

So over all I am very happy I’ve done the project but it’s no secret that I’ve got pretty sick of it. I have learnt a huge amount over the year, I think you can see that if you look over photos as a whole. The question is where do I go from here? What frequency will I be producing photos now that I’m not forced/required/committed to doing one daily? Honestly – I have no idea, all I can tell you is that I am in love with photography & I have more projects planned for myself. But from now I will be taking on non-time-based photography projects for example – I will be carrying on my Quotos & I also plan to start a project called 50 Strangers. So I might have a break for a little while, but keep your eyes on my flickr because it doesn’t end here.

This is also my first post as part of Project52, so I will be trying to do 1 blog post a week for the whole of 2010… yes I know I’m a sucka!

If you want to keep up with my photos & my bloggings I’d thoroughly suggest following me on twitter.

But wait! There’s more! If you pick something I use I’ll send you a print of a photo of your choice, so get involved!

If you haven’t seen any of my Quotos yet here are the ones I have done so far:

So what are you waiting for! HELP ME OUT!

Update 31^st December – So I didn’t end up finishing my 365 on a Quoto, it just didn’t feel right & I wasn’t going to sacrifice the quality of my Quoto set just to get something out the door.

P.S. I was going to use Phil’s Usual Suspect quote, but now I’m not & he doesn’t get a print, so instead I’m gunna give him a massive snog!

Let me know what you think, also you can check out more of my photos on my flickr.

P.S. You can totally see Kym in the background of the first 3 shots!

Kym came to see my yesterday too so I had a great excuse to try out the new lens in the park. I’ve had this Autumn style shoot in my head for a little while now and I’m really happy with how it came out. The lens is sharp at at every aperture, but of course with a lens like this you can’t resist shooting with it wide open.

Naturally with it being a prime lens it is super sharp, but it is still noticeably shaper than it’s little brother, the f/1.8. It is defiantly a worth while upgrade the build quality alone makes it worth it for me, the f/1.8 always felt flimsy. The UltraSonic Motor greatly improves focusing too, it is much faster and much more accurate. So really what I’m saying is f/1.4 = win!