Jon's Photography Blog

Sunrises and Sunsets

(Disclaimer: You can damage your vision and/or your camera by looking/aiming at the sun. Do not do that. No matter how convincing your says it, you will not win a free puppy.)

Capturing a sunset is an easy thing to do with a bit of understanding and some basic camera technique. The only real trick is understanding what it takes to get a correct exposure. Adding a nice foreground scores bonus points!

Exposure
The common factor in most good sunsets is a colorful sky, typically some flavor of orange or red transitioning to a deep blue. When your camera is pointed into the sun, the auto mode isn’t going to come up with the settings you want. It’s busy trying to get a balanced exposure and the result will be a washed out, white/grey sky. Not what you’re after. You need to tell your camera that you want an underexposed image (meaning you collect less light) in order to capture those colors. Start by underexposing by a full stop. (Consult your manual if you don’t know how to do this.) If the sun is still above the horizon you’ll need to underexpose the image even more.

Show up early, stay late.
Sometimes, the best colors will come while the sun is below the horizon. This is because the more atmosphere the light passes through, the more it will refract and reflect. Get familiar with the sunrise/sunset times in your area check the weather. Don’t be put off by clouds. Overcast isn’t good, but partly cloudy (especially high cirrus clouds) will make magic.

Foreground
A colorful sky is great, but an interesting foreground can add a lot to your image. Try to position yourself to catch interesting shapes in the sky. Backlit objects will show up as silhouettes, especially with your camera set to underexpose, so pay attention to the shape. Using a reflective surface such as a body of water or a glass-sided building can create interesting effects as well by spreading the amount of color throughout the frame.

Safety Issues (For You and Your Camera)
This is worth re-stating. Your mother was telling the truth about going blind (at least when she was telling you not to look at the sun.) The intense UV rays will damage all those sensitive eye parts forever.

Remember playing with a magnifying glass and figuring out you could set stuff on fire by focusing the sun’s energy into a spot? Your lens is a magnifying glass and you’re focusing the incoming light onto a small sensor. It may not burst into flames, but it could easily generate enough heat to damage your sensor or internal components. This hasn’t happened to any of my personal equipment, but I’ve had friends tell me they’ve melted a few.

Introduction to Sound Triggers

You know those photos where a bullet is slicing through a playing card or the wine glasses are caught just during the moment they’re breaking or a water balloon is exploding? Odds are, those and the many others like them are taken with a sound trigger.

So what’s a Sound Trigger?
A sound trigger is a very simple device that emits an electrical charge when it detects a loud noise. They’re also easy to modify, so you may see more advanced versions. Mine (pictured below) has an adjustable delay, adjustable sensitivity, and an off/off switch (which you’ll definitely want!)

How do you use it?
The sound trigger has a standard sync cable coming from it which you can use to set off your camera or to set off a remote flash (for images which require higher speeds to capture.) In general, the way to use it is to set up your shot and put the trigger near the object that’s going to make the noise (or turn up the sensitivity.) When the sound happens, the camera or flash is triggered. (My intention is to write some in-depth tutorials for the different ways to use a sound trigger, so check back.)

Where do you get one?
I found the plans online from HiViz and assembled one of the kits. If you’re interested in buying a kit, I’d highly recommend these guys. I had a bit of trouble with mine at first and one of the gents helped me troubleshoot it while he was on vacation in Asia. If you know your way around an electrical circuit, then check out their Make Your Own Trigger Circuits page for instructions and parts lists.

Shooting the Bird Feeder

When you think of a wildlife photographer you’ll often imagine a person laying on the ground shooting from hundreds of feet away with equipment that’s both the size and cost of your house. Well, that may be what it takes for a lot of shots, but getting close up with the birds doesn’t require a super long lens and a guille suit. All you’ll need is a tripod, a camera that you can set off remotely, and the right bait and you’ll be showing people the bird in no time.

Setup:

• Bird Feeder - The best type of feeder will be something that’s mobile, stable, and a height that you’ll be able to match with your tripod. You’ll get better results if the feeder is the type where you can predict exactly where the birds will perch and the direction they’ll be facing. Learn about the birds in your area and you may be able to use different types of feed to attract the specific types you want to photograph.
• Choose Your Background - Your background will make or break your shot. Be sure that you don’t have anything distracting that will detract from the image. A shallow depth of field will blur most any background into pleasing tones, but if you’re unable to achieve this effect, the selection of your background will be even more important.
• Lighting - Using a flash here is going to be difficult (explained further below) so be sure that the area the birds will be in is well illuminated. The best illumination will come from placing the camera between the feeder and the sun (but avoid casting a shadow on your subject.)
• A Place to Hide - Concealment is always a good thing with wildlife photography, but since we’re operating so close to the feeder, stealth is extremely important. The birds will quickly acclimate to the presence of your camera and tripod, but odds are they won’t be as comfortable around you. Find some cover and use a remote trigger to set off your camera.

Above is a setup I’ve used a few times. The bird feeder is a very simple design which works out great because it’s easy to move and a good height to use with my tripod in a low configuration. The circular rim means the birds can land from any direction, but by covering a section of the feed I can influence the position they’ll end up standing in. The camera has been placed between a wall of the house and a tree to make it not stand out so much (plus being near trees and bushes encourages more birds to visit.) With this setup I can sit inside the house with my wireless remote and watch the feeder through a window. (My big orange assistant loves to help with the watching for birds part, though he could use some work on the stealth part.)

The Exploding Bird Problem

Birds are skiddish. Even when they’ve gotten used to the presence of the camera, they’re instinctively going to fly away when it makes noise or the flash goes off. On most cameras, the frightening part will happen a fraction of a second before the image is captured. That’s enough time for the bird to react and start to fly away resulting in an image of blurry contortions and spread feathers that looks as though your subject has just popped.

The fix for this of course to take the picture without startling the bird, but that’s easier said than done. Here are some things to watch for and how to deal with them:

• MIrror Slap Noise - On a dSLR, the mirror needs to move up and out of the way of the sensor before a picture can be taken. This motion is what makes the first part of the very recognizable SLR camera sound. Use your camera’s mirror lock up function. If you don’t have this feature, more distance from the feeder is likely your only option.
• Focusing Noise - Even those whisper quiet internal focusing motors will create enough noise to startle most birds at the feeder. Avoid this by having your camera set to manual focus. Some cameras may also generate a beep to indicate they’re focused and ready to take a picture. This should also be disabled.
• AF Assist Light - Many cameras by default will be using some kind of light to assist with range finding and to focus in low light conditions. Make sure this light does not come on before the picture is taken. If it does, disable the feature or cover the light with something so that it can’t be seen.
• Preflash - If you’re using a flash be sure that you’re not using a setting that will emit any flashes before the picture is actually being taken. The red-eye reduction feature will emit a series of preflashes to constrict a person’s pupils which will reduce the amount of light reflected and thereby reduce or eliminate red-eye. Also, TTL flash systems will emit preflash to determine correct exposure settings. The flash, noise, and delay from these kinds of features will most certainly result in an exploded bird.

Camera Technique:

• Fast Shutter Speed - For most shots, a fast shutter speed is going to be the order of the day. How fast depends on the reaction time of the bird, but I’ve found that 1/500 is usually plenty fast to produce a nice, sharp image. At that speed you’ll need a lot of light or a high ISO for a good exposure.
• Manual Focus - If your feeder is stable and the bird lands in roughly the same spot each time then your focus doesn’t need to change. Avoid all of the issues caused by autofocus by setting the focus manually.
• Wide Aperture (But Not Too Wide!) - Having a wide aperture (smaller F number) will allow more light in making it easier to achieve a high shutter speed at a lower ISO. It will also narrow your depth of field and give you the blurry background look. That said, make sure that your DOF is wide enough so that your subject fits! The way I check is to stick two twigs into the feed (one leaning torward, the other leaning away) to mark the boundaries that the bird will sit inside. I then adjust my aperture and focal point so that both sticks are in focus. If you can’t get both sticks in focus, you can move the camera further from the feeder to increase the depth of field.
• Remote Trigger - A wireless remote (meaning that it uses radio and goes through obstacles, as opposed to infrared which requires line of sight) is a much better option here as gives you more flexibility in how you choose to hide.
• Sneak Attack - Eliminate as many causes of bird explosion (described earlier) as you can to obtain a natural looking image. Lock the mirror up, turn off the beeps, cover the lights, focus manually, and bring the cat inside.
• Know Your Flash Limitations - Flash Sync is the fastest shutter speed you can achieve while using a flash. Why this happens is a post unto itself, but basically it’s a complication between how long the brightest part of the flash lasts and the mechanics of how your shutter works. On most cameras I’ve used the max sync is in the 1/250 range which probably won’t be fast enough to freeze a startled bird. Check your manual to determine your camera’s sync speed. If it’s slower than 1/500 you may be disappointed with the results.

How to Capture Lightning

(Disclaimer: Lightning will kill you. I am not advising anyone to go out in an electrical storm. This is a descriptive post about how I take lightning images and the techniques that I use. Be smart. Be safe.)

There are few photos that inspire the awe of a good lightning shot. Perhaps it’s the rarity or the sheer power, but there’s no doubt that a lightning shot will draw a lot of attention. The best part is that taking a good shot is actually pretty easy.

The basic things to understand:

• Know Your Weather - I’ve seen storms up and down the east coast and down into the Caribbean. I lived in Florida for a year where I experienced the daily 3pm thunderstorms and now I’m living in the mountains of Southwestern Virginia where we mostly see storms in the late summer. What I’ve found is that storms can be very different from region to region, but are fairly easy to predict at a local level (mountain storms roll through fast and violent while Caribbean thunderstorms seem to drift by slowly.) A good source of real-time radar is very handy to have. My preference is the NOAA site, but there are much more user-friendly sites out there so look around.
• Pick a Good Location - Being in the right position ties into the above point. If you know how the storms in your area will move, you should be able to pick a spot ahead of it and wait. Open sky and a wide angle lens will give you a better chance of catching a bolt. More distance from the storm and a zoom lens is a much safer route to go plus it will give you more time to shoot.
• Time of Day - A storm associated with a frontal area can show up anytime while summer convective storms will typically happen in the afternoon or evening. The darker it is, the easier it will be to capture a well exposed lightning image (more about this in the technical section below.)

Shooting Techniques:

• Correct Exposure - Correct exposure for the actual bolt will be easy to obtain. It’s so bright that it’s going to be a thin white line no matter what your settings. The tricky bit is knowing when you’ve collected enough light to correctly expose the clouds, horizon, foreground, etc. that comprise the rest of your scene. If shooting in the daytime, your camera should be able to give you the correct settings, however, the shutter speed will be so quick that your odds of capturing a bolt will be slim. You can try using an ND filter and/or increasing your F-Stop to reduce the incoming light. Shooting at or after dusk is going to be much easier because you have longer intervals to shoot before your overall image becomes overexposed and washed out.
• The Shot Window - A shot window is just a way of saying the amount of time you have to collect light after you’ve reached a minimum exposure, but before your image becomes overexposed. The window will be from the time it takes to get the minimum exposure to roughly 2 to 4 times that amount. The goal is to start your picture, see some bolts, and have the shutter close inside that shot window. The importance of hitting this window is that it’s ensuring that the overall image is exposed properly and not just areas in the reflecting the lightning flash. As an example, let’s say we’re shooting a scene that without lightning flashes would take a 5 second shutter speed to get a bright enough exposure. It would also take 20 seconds of light collection before we’d consider the image to be overexposed. Our shot window is from 5 to 20 seconds after we’ve opened the shutter. Any more or any less and we will not be happy with the end result.
• Use a Cable Release and Bulb Mode - In most cases a delay timer can be used in place of a remote release. In this case however, the remote shutter will make life much easier. You can still use the delay timer, but the delay could cause some frustrations with missed shots. Bulb mode (opening and closing the shutter manually instead of having the camera use a preset shutter speed) is also beneficial. That will allow you to count to your shot window and close it early or late depending on the amount of lightning flashes you’ve had.
• Pause Your Exposure - If you’d like to fill your shot with multiple bolts, but the storm is dishing them out too slow for your shot window, try pausing your count by blocking the light coming into your lens with a sheet of paper. This trick is more useful when there’s a lot of ambient light which reduces your shot window, but it is also helpful at night to keep out unwanted light (such as the headlights of a car driving past.)

The Walkthrough:
Now let’s put the knowledge and basics into an example of how I got a specific shot (we’ll use the one at the top of this post with the four bolts.) During June we were having very strong late evening thunderstorms rolling through the valley like clockwork so I decided to catch one. I checked the NOAA radar and saw it approaching so I grabbed the camera with a 10.5mm fisheye attached and tripod and headed out to the field.

These storms typically come down the valley and pass by just to the west, so I set up in the a position that would let me pan along with its motion and not get blocked by the treeline. Once I had the tripod set and the remote trigger ready to go I took some baseline shots so I could get a feel for what the shot window would be. It was late evening so the shot window turned out to be between 20 and 80 seconds.

When the storm came into view I started taking pictures. Opening the shutter, counting to my shot window, and closing earlier if I had already seen some bolts, or later if I hadn’t. With the four bolt shot above, those strikes had come in quick succession almost immediately after I had opened the shutter. I continued counting until I hit about 20 seconds and closed the shutter. It wasn’t long after that when a bolt struck very near where I was standing at which point I knew it was time to go inside.

Bonus fun: If you find a particularly violent storm with a lot of strikes see if you can use the natural light to take a self portrait. The shot below took about 90 seconds and about a dozen bolts.

Interested in HDR? Check out StuckInCustoms

StuckinCustoms.com is a great place to go to see some amazing HDRs. He has some good tutorials on how to put one together as well as info on using texture layers to add a little something to your image.