Close up or macro shooting is an area of photography that has always interested me but somehow I never seem to spend much time putting my ideas into practice.  We’ve a bit of a cold snap going on at the moment and as I don’t want to go outside to shoot I have taken the opportunity to finally brush up on my macro skills.

Today I tried shooting water and oil droplets.  This was fun and really easy too, look to the end of the post for a behind the scenes picture and a few tips on how to shoot this.

I was going for a planets in space type vibe!

My settings varied a little from shot to shot and were generally around shutter speed 1/60 f5 and ISO2500.

And here is the pull back, please excuse the shot of my toilet!

I used my Nikkor 105mm macro lens on a tripod pointing down towards a clear bowl with water in the bottom.  The glass container is sitting on 2 bins to raise it up, I placed my coloured fabric underneath the bowl and dripped in some olive oil and then stirred it up a little.  Focus on the bubbles and not the fabric below and you can get some great effects.  For some photos I added a little bit of food colouring and I also experimented with different backgrounds – putting the fabric on the floor with the glass bowl raised above it also works really well.  My handbag is being used to stabilise my camera as it was top heavy at that angle onthe tripod.  I did try using flash but didn’t like the results.

Theo was really interested in what I was upto so we are going to try again using the macro setting on his point and shoot camera.  Not sure how well that will work but its certainly worth a try.

Have fun!

The most popular post by far on my blog is this one http://www.rebeccaspencerphotography.com/2010/12/tutorial-on-how-to-make-heart-shaped-bokeh/ and as it’s that time of year again I thought I’d have another go at capturing heart shaped bokeh.

This time I wanted to try and capture a subject as well as the pretty bokeh but as Theo is at school during daylight hours I thought I’d try with my lovely nativity characters. I started off with using just my lens to see how the bokeh looked. This was taken with my 35mm and my settings were f2 and ss1/100 and ISO800.

I had to play around for a while moving the nativity figures around so I could get them all on the same focal plane and I also found I had to be close to the figures but far from the tree. I was about 2 feet from the figures and about 8 feet from my Christmas tree. I also had to hang many more lights on the tree than I thought and arrange them so that the shape of the Christmas tree was obvious.

Once I was happy with my positioning and the results I could see on the back of my LCD I moved onto try to capture some heart shaped bokeh. I think I did pretty well.

Like 2 years ago I used a heart shape disc just popped onto the end of the lens, however this time I used my lensbaby as they have a little pre cut discs that fit exactly on the end of the lens.

The first thing I noticed when I tried to capture the heart shaped bokeh was how much light gets taken away by having a disc covering the majority of your lenses. I had to dial my ISO upto 3200 to let enough light in. I also struggled a little to keep the nativity figures in focus, but that’s lensbaby and manual focus for you!

I’d forgotten just how much fun this was, hope I’ve inspired you to have a go yourself.

My resolution for 2012 was for this to be the year where I finally put some of my photos on the walls of our home.  I’ve made a good start and if you come and visit me you’ll see I have finally put up the family photos we had taken by the wonderful Rachel Durik of Savor Photography, made an acrylic tryptic of the Japanese Anemone I shot in my Mum’s garden and have a lovely big canvas collage of our 2011 Devon holiday at the bottom of our stairs.  I’ve also purchased a little easel and have had a selection of my photos printed out as 12×8″ prints mounted on board, I keep these all on the easel and Theo changes them round most days.

One thing I noticed when I looked through the many hundred’s of photos I shot in 2011 was the lack of multiple great images from the same session.  Having just a couple good images from a session is fine if you only want one image for a frame but when it comes to putting photos together in an album or collage having some consistency across a group of images works a lot better.

So with that in mind I decided for my next photo shoot I would aim to try and get a nice selection of images of Theo that would work well when displayed together.

I set up a mini studio in our bedroom as the room which tends to have the best light in the house.  Like a lot of English homes this room is a little cramped and cluttered and this made me decide to use seamless paper as a way of creating a more ‘professional’ background.  My space was still too small to be ideal, really only the width of the double bed where Theo would sit and then an extra two feet gap where I would sit with my camera.  Theo would also be facing directly towards the window, great for creating nice catch lights in his eyes and even light on his face but wouldn’t work as a lighting set up that allowed for shadows and more depth to the image.

That all said I thought I would have a go, Theo was happy to play model and a rainy weekend day meant we were stuck in the house.

The first problem I encountered was just as I suspected, it really was a very cramped space!  Thank goodness I had selected my 50mm lens which is my original lens and still my favourite in low light situations.  I shot at f2.2 which is the lowest I find I can shoot at with a moving subject and consistently get both eyes in sharp focus, I also selected a fairly fast shutter speed of 1/250 as that boy of mine can move and this led to an ISO of 800.  One of the tricks I have learned when photographing children is to make the whole process fun and to find ways to keep them interested.  Often with Theo I’ll put on some music and let him bounce around to the tune whilst I grab my shots, or if we’re outside I’ll give him a little job to do and photograph that.  But in this mini studio our lack of space meant this normal approach just didn’t work as Theo kept moving outside of the frame and so back to the drawing board.

This photo gives you an idea of my set up and shows just how little space we had to play with.

In the end it was Theo who came up with the idea that saved the shoot, we’d been playing with a yellow plastic duck and Theo thought it would be funny to drop from standing to sitting, landing on the duck and making it squeak!  I asked if he could drop down and cross his legs at the same time and this became a fun game that made us both laugh and let me get my shots.  I waited and pressed my shutter at the split second Theo landed in a sitting position, it was a little tricky to keep my focus point on his eye but so worth doing as I just love the joy you can see in these photos.

These were my favourites from this part of the session;

I adore these photos as for me they show the Theo I know and love; the kind, thoughtful lad who can be surprisingly shy.

Finally I took 25 photos from the shoot and used a template to put them into a heart shape.  I’ve still got a couple of little tweaks to make to the order of the photos but as soon as this is finished I’ll be sending it to the print lab so I can then hang it on my wall.

This is one of those blog posts that every photographer writes at some point; I can guarantee that once you start taking good photos and posting them online people will constantly ask you what camera you shoot with. Sometimes they will even only comment on the camera as in ‘wow great photo, you must have a good camera’. Now I love me a good conversation about photography and I never mind this question but I do have to try not to smile when I am asked as it’s such a frequent occurrence!

I’ve heard people say that you wouldn’t ask a chef which oven he used to create your fabulous meal so why ask a photographer which camera they use as surely it’s the same thing? Personally I don’t think it’s quite the same, I mean I do own the Nikon D700 and the Fuji X100 which are a couple of (expensive) great cameras and without them I know my photos would not be as good so to me the equipment is important.

But only asking about the equipment misses the really important thing about the photo – how did the photographer shoot it? Trust me just taking a top of the range camera, setting it to auto and shooting away is going to leave you disappointed. All great photos have one thing in common – the way they use light. Yes capturing emotion, great composition and some polished processing amongst other things are all important but without working that light your photo will always lack that ‘professional’ finish.

See this snapshot of Theo and his teddy’s about to leap between the two beds? It was taken in the hotel room we stayed in over the weekend with my little Fuji x100 point & shoot and it’s cute but never had a chance of being anything other than a snapshot. The wall behind Theo is cluttered and distracting, that bright wall is throwing a colour cast on Theo’s skin and he is about as far away from the window which was the only natural light source in the room as you can get.

These next photos were taken with the same camera 10 minutes later at the other end of the hotel room.

This time I spent a few minutes preparing my setting – I moved the sofa nearer to the window and as the light was a little harsh I drew the nets to soften the light coming in. I also made sure I had a nice uncluttered background by hiding the standard light behind the curtains and taking the garish hotel picture off of the wall. I chose my Fuji x100 camera settings of 1/125 f2 ISO500 as I wanted a good depth of field (background blur) and encouraged my little model to pose which he did beautifully. Within 15 minutes Theo was happily eating his chocolate ‘bribe’ and I had both finished shooting and had put the hotel room back together again. Then back at home I cropped the photo in tighter and coverted them into black and white to get my final result.

Now of course these images are far from perfect, I still have a lot to learn and I know if I had used my D700 these would be sharper as it’s a ‘better’ camera than the Fuji. But I do hope this shows a little of what you can do with a non-professional camera if you look at the light first.

So if you see a great image don’t just ask the chef about their oven and instead ask about their recipe too!

I have given up trying to be subtle when I am taking photos of my son or his friends. I mean what is the point, they are all so used to me and my camera and it is not as if I own a delicate little camera that you can fit in your pocket. Nope I look like this when I am shooting.

So if i am already the Mum with the largest camera and lens at the play park I am thinking why not go one step further and take a 5:1 reflector with you! And after practicing for a bit I am beginning to realise why ‘proper’ photographers don’t get their camera out unless they have a reflector available. The difference a reflector can make to your photo is quite amazing, it can turn an ok photo into a stunning one.

A little bit about reflectors with the aid of my handsome assistant Theo

A reflector doesn’t have to be a shop bought one, often a natural reflector like a bright pavement or even a white t-shirt worn by the photographer can work really well. If you are going to buy a reflector and you want something that is easily portable the post popular type is the 5:1 collapsible reflector you can see in my photo. It’s called 5:1 as it comes with removable covers that let you change the surface colour to white, silver, gold, black or remove them all and use the mesh on the inside as a scrim to diffuse the light shining on your subject. I got mine from eBay and it cost me £10 – bargain!

Holding the reflector is the tricky bit, I sort of prop the reflector on my legs and angle it until I can see catch lights in my subjects eyes. If you don’t see catch lights then turn your subject around until you spot them. An alternative, aside from giving the reflector to someone else to hold, is to ask the subject to hold the reflector horizontally directly below their face – this result can look stunning just remember to crop in close so the reflector isn’t visible in the photo (have a look at the second photo in this blog post for an example of the subject holding the reflector). At a push even just laying the reflector flat on the ground in front of your subject can help reflect that light upwards and towards your subject.

Of course if you have a couple of little willing assistants ready to help then holding a reflector can become a lot easier!

And the final photo in this little tutorial – the beautiful Batey sisters, taken in full sun with my trusty reflector using the gold side to bounce a little warmth and light back into their pretty faces.
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As part of the Natural Light course I recently took run by the fabulous Beth Ross we had the opportunity to try our hand at taking silhouette photos, now this is a technique I’ve been wanting to try for ages. I think I have devoured every silhouette tutorial on the web and the push and support from Beth was the final step I needed to finally give silhouettes a go.

And now I have I think I am in love! As long as you have done a little bit of preparation they are so easy to do and I think the results can be just stunning. I know I appreciated all the advice I was given so here is my attempt to give something back with a little 4 step silhouette tutorial, I hope it will be the push you need to get out there and give silhouette photography a chance.

It will help if you are comfortable shooting in manual but you could also do this in one of the semi auto modes like aperture priority or even with a point and shoot camera as long as you know how to lock your exposure. If you are not sure how to do this I would suggest having a look in your camera instructions to see if it’s an available option.

4 easy steps to shoot a fabulous silhouette photograph

Step 1 – When
To make this work you are going to need a bright light source behind your subject, I find the easiest way to do this is to use the sun when it’s low in the sky. Either sunrise or sunset will do. So firstly you need to know when the sunrise and sunsets are going to happen on the day of your photo shoot. There are lots of websites out there that will do this, just google ‘sunset times’. I tend to use a little freeware tool which lets me print a personalised calendar and I also love http://www.golden-hour.com/ as this shows you the whole window of time from when the sun starts to set to when it’s gone below the horizon.

Step 2 – Where
You are looking for an uninterrupted background, not one that’s cluttered with a lot of buildings, trees or mountains. You do not want anything to get in-between your subject and the sun. If you live near a beach where the sun sets out over the sea then you have struck silhouette gold, lucky thing! My location for most of the examples I will show you in this tutorial was not particularly glamorous, just a field on the outskirts of my nearest town but it did have a couple of things going for it. I was not going to lose sight of the sun behind trees as it set and importantly it had a little bit of a slope to it, you’ll see why that’s helpful in a bit.

Here is my field with the sun about 45minutes before setting. I am right in the middle of the golden hour with a lovely soft golden light all around me. This photo is SOOC (straight out of camera) which should give you an idea of what the sky looked like that night.

Some cloud is fine, in fact I like the texture cloud gives to a photo, but not too much as you need that light source to be bright enough to illuminate your subject and create the silhouette.

Tips on how to find a good location
I live in the northern hemisphere and so I know the sun will rise in the east and set in the west, combine this basic knowledge with Google maps zoomed right in and then you’ve got an easy way of looking for potential good uncluttered sunset/sunrise locations. You might also want to draw on local knowledge from other photographers, I asked on my local Flickr group and they helpfully came up with a range of suggestions and showed me photos of what those sites looked like as well. Another website that can be really helpful is the Photographers Ephermeris as this will show you on a map the predicted route the sun will take.

Step 3 – How
You have your location, you are there at the right time so now all you need to do is to take your silhouette photo. Don’t worry this is the easy bit!

In short what you are going to do is create your silhouette through underexposing your subject by correctly exposing for that bright sky.

I use spot metering and take an exposure reading from a bright part of the sky. If you are not shooting manual this is the bit where you point your camera at the bright sky and lock your exposure for that reading. Do not point your camera too close to the sun as this could damage both your eyes and your camera’s sensor. I like to use an mid range aperture of f5.6 or f8 as I want to get a lot of my subject in focus and have nice crisp edges to my silhouette. But to be honest virtually any aperture will work so just choose the settings that set your exposure correctly for that bright sky.

A couple more things to bear in mind before you start taking your photos. Silhouettes look best when the viewer can see a clearly recognisable form, this could be a person, a group of people or an object. When looking at your shot through the viewfinder or reviewing your images on the camera keep checking that you are capturing silhouettes that others will recognise.

Some objects like this windmill have a naturally defined form.

Photos of people work best when their limbs aren’t all bunched up against their body. This often means with photos of people you’ll need to get them to move around so their limbs aren’t close to their body – action shots often work well as this is a good natural way of getting people to stretch out their arms and legs.

To keep that bright light behind your subject matter you will need to get down lower than your subject. Do this by either lying on the ground and pointing your camera up at them or making use of that slope by putting yourself at the bottom with your subjects in front of the sun at the top of the slope. If you are really stuck you could try positioning your subject on an object to raise them up or get them to jump up in the air, if you don’t you will find they blend into the ground at the bottom of the frame. Camera angle is crucial when you are taking your silhouette photo.

Finally it is time to take your photo. Snap away and then have a look at the LCD view screen to check it all looks fine. I often find my silhouette isn’t dark enough and you can make out too many details so I’ll increase my shutter speed a few more clicks and try again. Play around with both your own and your subjects position, just little changes can make a lot of difference. If the sun has almost yet or just set then you will need your subject right in front of the sun to make them stand out from the background.
Hopefully you now have some good silhouette photos so on to the final step – a little post processing to take that photo from good to frame worthy.

Step 4 – Finishing your photo
Post processing of silhouettes is both easy and fun. The first thing I do with my image once I’ve uploaded it to my PC is to look at it in Lightroom (you can also use ACR for this) and to darken my blacks if the silhouette doesn’t look as defined as I would like it to be. I sometimes also play with the exposure slider and add bit of contrast. This gives me a base image to either take over to Photoshop for more artistic editing or I will finish my editing within Lightroom. Sliding the white balance sliders in Lightroom / ACR around can make a dramatic different to your image.

This photo was taken on the same night as the others and to get that fiery sky all I did was change the white balance preset in Lightroom to Shade.

And this time I added some more magenta into the white balance.

I find adding a hue/saturation layer in Photoshop and moving the sliders around can really bring out some great colours. You can increase your control with the hue/saturation adjustment if you select the different colour channels from the menu e.g. cyan rather than use master which controls all the hues at the same time.

For a really quick edit just try running any colour pop style action on your image, you might be surprised at just how dramatically this can change your photo.

I hope you have as much fun as I did, please post a link to any photos you take trying this tutorial in the comments as I would love to see them.

I love my friends, they make me laugh. When I knew what this week’s P52 theme was I thought I might as well ask a few people for suggestions and boy did they come up with some great descriptions!

There were two consistent themes. One was about me being a multi-tasker who plays many roles; mother, photography, chicken keeper and so on. And the other theme was that I’m fun and just a little bit mad!

So based on that here is my take on this week’s project 52 theme “How other’s see you”

How did I take this photo? It’s pretty easy, just needs a bit of planning and use of a photo editing software that lets you use layers and masks. I used Photoshop but Elements and Paint Shop Pro would work fine too.

To make this effect you stack photos on top of each other in layers and use masks to control what is visible in each photo. For this shot I wanted it to look like all the Rebecca’s were in the room at the same time (what a scary thought!) and having a consistent exposure makes this look more convincing. So I used a tripod to ensure my camera stayed in exactly the same position and pre-set my white balance in camera so it didn’t change if the lighting conditions changed during the time it took me to shoot all the exposures. You don’t have to set an exact white balance, just don’t use auto wb.

First I took a shot of the room without me in it, this works as your bottom layer/background. I used a remote release to take each photo once I was in position – you can see it in my hand in a number of the shots. A trick I’ve found works is to have a large cuddly toy that you can put into position first so you can set your focus as it can be tricky to get good focus when taking a self portrait.

Here is my empty room, my background for the photo.

Once you’ve got all your photos open in your editing software copy and paste them so they are all in the same document with the empty room as the bottom layer. From now on you’ll need to use layer masks – give every layer except the bottom one a mask. In CS5 select your layer and then click this

to add a layer mask. Then invert the layer mask so it’s now black not white – invert is in your mask options.

In the land of masks “black conceals and white reveals”, so as you should now have a load of black masks with each photo the view on your screen should be the bottom background layer – our empty room. Now take a soft white brush and starting with any one of your layers click on the layer mask to ensure it’s selected, then back on your photo use your white brush to paint where your figure is to make it visible. As you used a tripod you should find you don’t need to be too accurate as the background is the same for both pictures but if you do make a mistake just switch your brush to black and paint back over your mistake on the mask layer to hide it again. Next you need to do the same for each layer, slowly revealing the part of the photo with the person in it.

When I’d finished painting the Rebecca’s back in my photo and the layers looked like this. Note only the background and top layer (the balloon photo) are currently turned on which is why you can only see the balloon photo.

Here is a closeup of the mask on that balloon layer.

And a close up of all my layer masks so you can hopefully get a better idea for which bit of each photo has been painted white and therefore revealed.

That’s about it. I saved a PSD layered file so I had everything still available if I wanted to change it again and then saved myself a jpeg. On that jpeg I ran Jodi’s MCP Fusion Action One Click Color and then cropped it slightly, resized for Flickr and stuck on a little watermark.

Took me about 30 mins to shoot the photos and about the same again to edit it. I hope you like the result! If you are inspired to try this please post a link in the comments to your photo as I’d love to see it.

Two photos this week of the same cheeky little boy, same garden and taken by the same photographer using the same camera lens, just they were taken nine months apart.

This photo was taken in June 2010 on the very day I decided to try and take this photography hobby of mine a little further. I still like it, especially Theo’s mischievous grin and that lop sided hat but it’s a classic illustration of what happens if you let the camera choose the settings and don’t put any thought into where to place your subject. Theo is standing in the middle of the garden with bright sun overhead so just look at those deep shadows around his eyes and there are no sparkly catchlights in his eyes. You can also see a lot of garden ‘clutter’ behind him which I think is distracting.

My second photo was taken yesterday, it is far from perfect but I do hope you can see a bit of improvement over these nine months. This photo was taken as the sun was going down and it was already getting dark in my garden so I adjusted my camera settings to a wide open aparture f2.2 to let in lots of light plus give me that nice blurry background. Then I pushed up my ISO so I could keep my shutter speed to 1/125 which is the lowest I’ll go when using my 50mm lens. I climbed on a flower pot to take the photo which positioned me higher than Theo and meant I could capture the grass as a background behind Theo. It also had the added benefit of making him look up at me so I could place my camera focal point directly on his eyes and made him laugh to see me wobbling around on a flower pot!

So here you go Linda, one dog minus it’s leash and harness, hope you like it.

I also couldn’t resist a play with the photo to boost those lovely colours and highlight that beautiful sunlight. I also stretched the canvas out to the left a little as I feel having the doggy looking out into an open space improves the composition.

I really enjoyed playing with this photo, if anyone else has a photo they’d like me to edit for them send me a message via a comment on this thread or via the contact me button and I’ll see what I can do.