This week we worked on creative shutter speed. I got some great entries! Here are a few of my favorites.

Andrea did a great stopped action water skiing picture. I love that the droplets are all frozen in place! Also great composition.


Doug did a cool zoom exposure of a clock.


And Rebecca T. did a great picture of her son with the hose. Great light, composition, and a nice, slow shutter speed to get the water to move into the lines instead of stopping in place.

This weeks lesson was on creative aperture. Here are 3 images that I really liked from their homework!

Betina's cute daughter and her kissy face. I love that her lips are the only thing in focus.


Rebecca's nest and eggs. She says she risked life and limb for this shot. I think it was worth it!


And Sharon taught her 11 yr old grand daughter what we had learned so far and gave her a camera to play with. I think she's a budding photographer!

When I was in college, there was this glass display case outside the photography rooms. The day after an assignment was due, we would all crowd around and see whose images stood out enough to make it into the case for the week.

I'm doing something similar with my class but instead of a glass case...it's my blog.

So, without further adieu, I present to you week one's photos of the week. The assignment this week was ISO. High and Low.

Shannon's Daisy. Love the way the light blasts through the petals and the slightly abstract quality. Great focus and color.


Rebecca's wildflowers. Nice depth of field and composition. You didn't let anything distracting get into the image and you used the rule of thirds with the focused flowers.


Richelle's courthouse. Great exposure for a night shot. The lights add a lot of depth to the image. Good composition too.

EDIT! That email appears to be down. Please use mistydawnphotos@gmail.com instead. Thank you!

I've had many requests to teach a class that's more substantial than the one hour classes I've taught for various groups.

Now is your chance!

I'm teaching a 6 week course, starting on June 2nd. It's Wednesdays from 7-8 PM and is $75 per person. There is a TEN PERSON LIMIT to this class so sign up now! Payment is due at the first class.

The course will focus on understanding your camera, understanding exposure/light and shooting in manual mode. It will be very hands on and there will be an assignment each week that you'll bring in so we can offer constructive criticism. It will be geared towards those with SLR cameras (the ones with interchangeable lenses.)

To sign up, email me at me@mistyalger.com. First come, first serve!

Take more pictures!

There's no excuse to not take a ton of pictures these days. With digital, you can shoot all you want and delete what you don't need later.

My daughter turned 2 a couple weeks ago so I took her out for a birthday shoot. It was freezing outside but we powered through. These were taken in about a 20 second window of time.



This is the one I liked from all of those.



There's a setting on most cameras that has a picture of 3 rectangles stacked on top of each other. That's the continual shooting mode. If you turn it on, then as long as you're holding the shutter release down, the camera will keep shooting.

Not only should you shoot a lot of one thing, but document everything and don't wait for perfection!



The picture of the grandkids with my parents was used on their Christmas card that year.

The boy in the toilet is my now 4 year old. He could climb before he could walk. It got him in a few pickles. If you want to read the story it's on my other blog

The same boy is on his head in the car because he was proud of himself for making a Y. That's a cell phone pic.

The little girls are my niece and daughter. I love that my niece is pinching her cheek. They're 6 months apart in age. I used the reindeer on my Christmas Card one year and the sprinkles were spilled while I was making this presentation, so I took a picture.

Right after finishing that slide, my 4 year old came over with a thought bubble sticker on his head. I thought "this is a perfect example!" and took a quick picture. He's thinking "I 'heart' you" and he wanted to show me.





I never would have seen that rainbow that was right outside my front door, if it wasn't for my cousin. She called and told me to hurry up and get outside.

I saw the rainbow and came right back in for my camera and to call my kids out. They came running out with various items on their heads to block the rain. A pillow, a shoebox, and a cup, open side up, to catch the rain before it hit him.

If you don't have a camera with you, take a mental picture. I have a friend who told me her mom actually holds her hands up and clicks her tongue like she's taking a picture. The action helps her cement the image in her memory. I just imagine myself taking a picture and it stays in my mind. There are many things from midnight moments with my kids, to a crop duster flying into the sunset over a wheat field, that I get to enjoy all by myself because I only have mental pictures of them.



You have to use your imagination a little there. That's from my shoe alphabet. I got bored one day and my sister has a lot of shoes.

Another bored moment brought about several googly eye pictures.



I love them.

Get in the pictures!



I hear all the time from women and men, alike, that they don't like to have pictures taken of them because they're too...fill in the blank... Well, I got news for you. In 10 years you're going to wish you'd gotten in those pictures when you were 10 years younger, 10 years thinner, etc. You only live once, and pictures conjure up memories. Your children are going to be devastated when you're gone and they don't have pictures of you the way they remember you. So get in the pictures!

People don't take pictures of me. Many of my family members have stopped bring cameras to family functions because they know I'll be there with mine. Therefore...no pictures of me. So I'm always turning the camera on myself and doing cheesy self portraits. Or I hand it off to my kids. The one of me with my 3 younger kids, was taken by my 8 year old. My 4 year old took the black and white picture and I took the one on the beach myself.



Don't just shoot the obvious beauty. Keep your eye out for the beauty in all the little things around you. A friend of mine has fallen in love with her little part of the world by doing this exact thing.



A huge print of the birdhouses hangs on my wall. I've heard from several people that it wouldn't have even occurred to them to veer off the freeway for a picture of it. I can't help it most of the time. I get really bummed when I miss a photo op.



I think the natural thing to do here would be to step 3 feet to the left and take out the sign. But I love it. I think it makes the whole image.



I ended my class with pictures of beautiful women and young women and talked about something that breaks my heart and that's low self esteem.

It hurts me when my fellow sisters are down on themselves. I truly, truly believe that there is beauty in everyone and everything. When I was in Hawaii, we were at church and a man was speaking and he said "Jesus didn't make no duds." I thought to myself, how profound! We can look at a rose, a sunset, an ocean, a storm and marvel at the beauty around us. But how often do we look at our friend, our neighbor or most importantly ourselves and only see our weaknesses? We are all just as beautiful as every other creation out there and we MUST stand in our majesty and teach our daughters, by example, by the way we think of ourselves, that THEY ARE BEAUTIFUL. We have to fight for them and for our own self worth. We have to see the beauty. We have to believe.

Because it's my job to take pictures that allow people to see their own natural beauty, I've trained myself to make positive snap judgments of everyone I see. Sometimes I make a game of it when I'm walking through crowds of strangers. Where is her most beautiful line? What feature of his would I bring out in an image? It's completely changed my outlook on everything. Try it! It's really fun.

I hope this could help some of you! Eventually, I'll put some lessons up that deal with shooting in manual. Be happy! Take pictures!

If the only composition tip you follow it to get closer, then you'll still improve your pictures. When you look back at your pictures in 20 years you're not going to care about your wall or the the grass and sky around the subject. You're going to want to see the subject! So get up close!

I looked through my pictures forever to find an image that was badly composed and I couldn't find one. Not because I don't take them, but because if I do take one, I either ditch it or crop it right away. But I finally found one that my husband took that's a great example.

I had tossed him the camera on Easter so he'd take a picture of me with the kids and this is what happened.



Notice all the dead, unimportant space around us, with our faces in the center of the image and the angle of him standing and shooting down from several feet away. Change those few things and the picture is instantly better.



Don't be afraid to get in super close. You're going to want to remember the color of her eyes and her freckles. You likely won't care so much about her clothes or the location in 20 years.



There are exceptions. If the background really adds to the image, then include it!



The rule of thirds is a universal art rule. Look around at the art around you and you'll notice it everywhere. Have you ever seen that tic tac toe grid on your lcd screen or in your viewfinder? That does not mean "center me please". That's a way to utilize the rule of thirds. The idea is to put the main subject in one of the cross sections or lines on the grid.

Examples.
The main subject is the flower.





Here there are two points of interest. The cute frowny face and the foot stamp.





On portraits, the eyes are the main subject. Get them in one of those thirds quadrants!





Again, 2 points of interest, the feet and the reflection. Both hitting one of the thirds.





On landscapes, you want the horizon to hit a line, not run down the center.





Framing is done by simply finding something interesting to frame your image with. This is taken at the local rose gardens. Everybody takes pictures of the flowers there. Add a frame (this is a part of the fence) and it adds interest.



This is taken through the back end of a telescope.



and this one was taken through the viewfinder of an old kodak duaflex. (I carry a frame with me, lol)



A brief word on angles. The most flattering angle on most women is to be above them and off to one side or the other, shooting down. It smooths out lines and eliminates any multiple chin issues.



On kids, you need to get on their level, this means squatting or even laying flat down to shoot.



With these marbles, I threw a blanket down so I wouldn't get soaked in the rain and held an umbrella in one hand and laid down to shoot.



ok, that's good for today. Go play with composition! See what you can do and report back if you want to!

Next up is side light. This means the main light source is on one side or the other of the subject. Side light gives a nice 3d effect to your image with the stronger contrast between light and shadow.

If your camera is having trouble exposing correctly for side light, you need to point your camera at the brighter portion of the image (where the light is hitting the face) and hold the shutter release down half way until it beeps. Now don't let go, move the camera to whatever composition you wanted, and push the button the rest of the way. This way you won't get those bright white, over exposed spots on the skin called blowouts.


window side light in a studio setting.


window side light in a public setting.


sun side light outside.

The easiest way to do side light in the sun (this also works beautifully for front light) is called open shade. Suppose you have a building or a tree casting full shade in an area on a sunny day. If you put your subject just inside the shade and you stand in the sunny area, then they'll have the nice even light from the sunny area to illuminate them without the harsh shadows because they're in the shade. Make sure there are no buildings right behind you (the photographer) because this will cause shadows in their eyes and you lose the life of the image. Let me know if you need a picture to illustrate this. I feel like I'm not explaining it very well.

Lastly, back light. This is my favorite sort of lighting. I love how much drama and intrigue it adds to an image. It's so much more interesting than any other lighting if it's done correctly.

A camera reads the main light source coming into the lens. This is why any time the sun (or whatever) is right behind your subject, you get a silhouette. (you would not believe how long it's taken me to learn to spell that word right without looking it up first, lol). Anyway, this isn't always bad. Silhouette's can be fun. Especially at sunset. For example.



But right after I took that image, the little boy in the middle turned to grin at me and I couldn't capture that with a silhouette. So I made some minor changes to my exposure to make the camera read the reflected light from their faces instead of the light from the sunset and got this.



Cute, right?

You can see that when you're exposing for the subject instead of the sun, then you blow out the background. (it turns bright white). Some photographers don't like that and there are ways to avoid blowing it out (using off camera lighting) but for the purpose of this tutorial we're just going to blow the background. Personally, I still love it. It brings all the focus to the main subject and sometimes makes a pretty haze. This is window back light.


The easiest way to trick your camera into exposing for the reflected light on the subject instead of the main light source is to point the camera at the ground right in front of the subject and hold the button down half way til it beeps. Move it back up to your subject and push it the rest of the way. You can also hold your hand in front of the lens and expose on your hand or get right up close to the person and fill the frame with them to set your exposure, then back up and shoot.

With back light you can also play with shadow pictures,


Sun flare,


and halos.


Go try side light and back light. Feel free to ask questions and share your images!

I taught this class the other day and wanted to make a blog version for reference and for anyone who couldn't go but was interested. There are a lot of slides, so I'm going to break it down into sections.


Photography comes from the greek words 'phos' and 'graphis' meaning light and paintbrush or drawing. So photography means to paint with light. A good photographer knows their light source and how to use their camera to manipulate the light and the way it moves and reflects into the final image that they want.


3 simple steps to improving your pictures. I'll go through this in detail over the next several blog posts.


First - TURN OFF YOUR FLASH! An on camera flash gives direct, flat light that blasts your subject. It eliminates natural shadows and puts tiny pinpricks in the center of the pupil or causes red eye. It often will wash out your subject if you're too close and alternatively will not illuminate your subject if you're too far away. (pet peeve....flashes at concerts. They don't do anything!!!) A flash typically lights up about 10 feet in front of the camera.



Compare these images. On the second one, you have what you see when you look at somebody. Nice catchlights in a more natural location (in the corner of the iris rather than the center of the pupil), and the contrast of light and shadow in a soft way because it's window light. Ask yourself...when you are admiring beauty, whether it be a person, a flower, a sunset, do you carry a spotlight around to blast it so you can admire it better? No! Often beauty appears BECAUSE of the effects of the natural light. Same goes for pictures.

These next several slides are examples of different light sources.




Windows diffuse sunlight making a nice even light. If it needs diffused more, you can put sheer curtains or opaque plastic over the window.


In this the sun is behind her on the left. There was a tin barn to my right reflecting the sun and I was laying on the dead, golden grass that was also reflecting the light back at her face.


Outside at night with only a spotlight.


It was night and all the lights in my house were off. You have to hold very still or use a tripod for this sort of picture.


Clouds act as a diffuser the same way that windows and curtains do. It evens out the sunlight, eliminating harsh shadows.


Imagine camping or candles on a birthday cake. With your flash off you'll get that natural play of fire light flickering on the face of your subject.

There are 3 main locations of light. Front light, side light and back light. I'm going to go through front light now and then tomorrow I'll do side light and back light. If you want to, go try these out and share your photos with a link in the comments! I'd love to see what you do!

Front light just means the main light source is in front of the subject. This means it's behind the photographer. This is gorgeous when you have a window for your main light source.

This picture is window front light.


When you're outside, the sun is not the best for portrait front light because your subject will be squinting and scrunching their face up. However, if they're turned backwards or looking down it can make some good shadows.

This is front lit by the sun outside.


On landscapes if the sun is behind you, you'll get even light all around so your sky and your ground will be evenly exposed. (one won't be drastically darker or lighter than the other.)


These are both examples of good catch lights. Catch lights brighten up the eyes and give life to the picture. In portraits, the eyes are really important and the more you can do in your initial image the better. Overly photoshopped eyes never look quite as good as just getting it right to begin with.




Ok, go try it! Turn your flash off and see what you can do with natural light. Feel free to ask questions in the comments and have fun! I'll put part 2 up tomorrow.