Winter Photography Tips and Tricks - Part 2

Here are some more useful tips for proper metering in tricky situations

1) Meter off the blue sky

If you have a clear blur sky over you, a very good approximation of average metering can be obtained by metering off the sky.

2) Metering off your Hand

Your hand can also act as a good exposure metering source. if the same light falling on the object you are planning to photograph is falling on your hand, then you can adjust for a proper exposure of the palm of your hand. Its important to remember that you need to open one stop more of light after you have set proper exposure for your hand. The easiest way achieve this by adjusting the shutter speed. If you see 1/60 sec as a proper exposure on you hand, the opening one stop more will give you 1/30 sec. Keep Aperture constant here. If you use the manual mode, you should find this easy. Another way is to keep increase aperture by one stop. This will impact the depth of field and therefore not suited in certain situations (same can be said with shutter speed also). If you are adjusting the aperture, then if if you need to open op one stop, then go to the next lower f number. If the current aperture is f5.6, then move to f4. The color differences in skin wil not make major changes to your exposure.

Metering Snow - Winter Photography Tips and Tricks - Part 1

Metering is a very complicated subject and i am still learning the basics of it. All camera meters try to expose the subject as a medium tone/ Average exposure. In many cases that will work. Many of the objects that we deal with in real life have medium tone.

All light meters are calibrated to 18% grey or Average. What this means is that when you expose for an average subject you have a very good chance of getting the metering right. But consider a more complex situation like Snow or a Black gorilla. These are not average subjects and the light meter will be way off if it tries to meter them. If you take pitures of snow, you may notice that the snow itself appears grey and not white as u see it. This is because your camera light meter is trying to expose the snow as 18% grey and not as white.

In these situations its best to have a 18% gray card with you. Meter the gray card on the same light that falls on the snow. This is very important. Adjust your exposure to get the right settings and shoot. This will give you the correct exposure you need. Snow will start to look white again.

18% grey cards are very inexpensive and are available in most photo shops.In addition to exposure control, these grey cards also help you to maintein proper white balance in your picture. If you have pictures with tint of yellow or blue tint, then this could be a very good solution to these problems. What you need to do is take an additional photo with the grey card on the same light. And the in post processing, set the custom white balance to the grey card's color. This will correct any color deviations in your picture in one click.

Here are some highly rated ones from Amazon.

If you are serious in getting proper color and exposure in your pictures, then you should definitely invest in one of these.

Again you may not be able to carry these cards everywhere you go. Here is a good trick in those situations. This will help with correct exposure but not with white balance. Use the gray card to calibrate the palm of your hand. Once you know the difference in exposure, its easy to meter off your hand and adjust to make it 10% gray reading.

This tip will help very much during Winter when you need to capture fun moments in snow .

Preview - Canon EOS 400D / Rebel Xti

Canon EOS Rebel XTi - 400D

What's Hot about this ?

Canon's latest Entry level Digital SLR that packs a lot of punch

• 10 MP CMOS Sensor

• 3 point dust reduction technology

• dust shake off from the low pass filter

• construction from dust resistant materials

• software based dust mapping and removal

• 2.5 inch LCD

• RGB Histogram as well as Brightness Histogram

• Continuous shooting at 3 frames per second

• Large image buffer that holds 27 JPEG or 10 RAW images

• Nine point Auto Focus

• Picture Styles (previously available in 5D)

Recommended for

If you are serious about phtography and upgrading from a point and shoot camera.

One of the best entry level SLRs available.

If you want to learn photography and improve your pictures.

(The previous model of this camera Rebel XT is also still popular and really worth looking at as its available much cheaper than the XTi)

I have owned this camera for over an year. Checkout My Flickr Gallery for more sample pictures taken with it

Other cameras that you might want to consider

Nikon D40X, Canon Rebel XT (350D)

Buyer Beware: There are a lot of scam operators trying to sell cameras at a very low price. Keep away from them and buy from reliable dealers only. I recommend going to websites like http://welcome.bbb.org/ and http://resellerratings.com before making the purchase

Or buy it from a reputed store like Amazon

Tips on Low Light Photography - part II

Garden Of Gods, 1805 N 30th Street (at Gateway Rd.)
Colorado Springs, CO 80904

www.gardenofgods.com

Garden of Gods features some amazing red rock formations in the state. This is a free for all park that offers unpaved hiking paths, interesting challenges for rock climbers, sandstone formations, a wonderful view of Pikes Peak, etc. To make interesting photographs you need to visit this place early before sunrise or during late evenings. This time was my second visit here and i reached there almost around sunset time. The picture above was taken after sunset.

Tech info on the Photo:

Camera:	Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi
Exposure:	0.6 sec (3/5)
Aperture:	f/22
Focal Length:	18 mm
ISO Speed:	400
Exposure Bias:	0/3 EV

Here are some more tips to keep in mind while taking photos in low light.

1) I almost always use a tripod. This was already mentioned in the first part of this series but i cant stress this enough. This is the single most important factor in low light shooting.

2) Mirror Lockup. (MLU) . In canon SLR cameras like the rebel series, its available under custom functions. enabling this helps prevent some vibrations caused by the mirror lifting up when shutter is pressed.

3) Remote Cable release This is a very valuable tool. This will help prevent camera shake when u actually press the shutter. Since the switch is connected to the camera using a cable or in some cases Infra Red rays, the shake caused while pressing the shutter button will not transfer over to the camera.

The remote cable release is also very useful for taking Bulb exposures. (Bulb exposures are custom long exposures that is accessible through the manual mode. Basically you can keep the shutter open as long as you want by keeping the shutter button pressed.

More to follow... keep checking
Arun (www.asasidh.com)