Photo 101 Class

A new photo 101 class is starting up this next Wednesday. Class starts at 6 pm till 8 pm and will run for the next 4 consecutive Wednesdays. Classes will be at studio F22 address is 3442 Waialae #4 Honolulu Hi 96816 phone is 808- 285-1907. Topics of call will be exposure F stops ans shutter speed understanding your camera white balance file size etc. Lens types light and how it effects you subject. for more information or to make a reservation please call or E mail john_chisholm27@yahoo.com

Okay here is a new toy. Well new for me. It's the Mila Grid flash diffuser. It's pretty cool. Looks like a big fly swatter and you bend it over your flash. What it does is soften the light coming of the flash so you don't get that nasty flash effect look to your shots. I shot this with flash on 1/16 power about 5.6 on camera flash. ISO was 400 and I am getting just a light touch from the flash to open up the shadows but not overpower the shot. The Idea is to make look as if the is no flash at all. You can see some catch lights in the eyes and that is the only tip off that the was flash used. Oh by the way http://www.milagrid.com/ I got mine in a couple of days
Aloha

Raw vs J peg
OK I am a convert,with a few exceptions. I used to use j peg for most of my shots and I would only use the Raw mode if I was unsure of my exposure and wanted to back up the J peg with a raw file just in case. I had shot a couple of jobs on Raw and it had taken so long edit the shots and I was going to convert them to J peg anyway it just seemed like a big hassle. But that was before I started using Lightroom editing software. When I shoot I raw I always shoot the small J peg too. Lightroom stacks the J peg and the raw on top of each other so you only see the one file. Also when you edit and adjust the file it converts the raw the same way. So raw give me more “latitude” and that means I can save more photos that I would have to toss if they were shot in J peg only. Here is a good Example from a job I shot a the Honolulu Art Academy. This was my first shot and I bounced the flash but it hit a little hot. So I adjusted and shot another. But since this is live action the shot with the worst exposure has the best expressions. However with a Raw file I can adjust the shot and pull down the exposure in light room and save the shot. So I am going to shoot allot more Raw files. More on this later
Aloha For now

Nickey#1

This was a shot that I did in my studio, I wanted to give it the feeling of being shot late in the day. To do this I used two lights one with a cool filter and one with a warm filter. The warm filtered light was set at about 45 degree angle to the background right of the camera, with the standard reflector and orange filter clamped to it. For the cool light I also used a standard reflector and clamped a cool blue filter to it. However instead of putting the cool light at 45degrees to the background I set a 5 foot by 2 foot mirror at 45 degrees left of the camera and bounced the light off of it . The mirror to gives the light a very directional look and will produce a sharper shadow. I set the model very close to the background so she would cast a shadow.
So what is going on here is the shadow from the cool light is being filled with warm light so it looks like a warm shadow and the warm light's shadow is being filled with cool light. When the two lights mix on the model and on the background they neutralize each other to some extent and make a white light. Changing the color of the filters and the power of flash will change the overall color balance. This is an example of how a shadows are a good opportunity to add some color. Please let me know what you think

Photo 101 Class

This is a photography class for anybody just getting into photography serious and would like to know more about this controls on their camera. I talk about f stops shutter speeds lens selection composition with balance file size. And a lot more stuff. The class starts July 8th and runs every Wednesday for 4 Wednesdays ending on July 29th the time is 6 to 8 pm and the location of the first three classes will be studio f 22 The fourth class is an excursion or field trip. The Studio address is address is 3442 Waialae #4 There is parking in the back for those who come early otherwise street parking is free and available. Contact me via E mail Classes do fill up but walk ins are welcome

Chinatown shoot

Here is a shot that I took the other night in Chinatown. We had a ton of lighting gear and a portable generator but I got this with an on camera flash and no tripod. OK here how it worked I used a long lens to pull in background and compress the image about 105mm set my focus to continuous because the model was walking into the shot my ISO was set to 640, Thats about as high as you can go with out to much noise. My shutter was set to 30th of a second and my f stop was F4. I wanted F4 so I could get a nice blur on the background. My white balance is set to flash. Now the tricky part was getting the flash to a little soft and directional at the same time. I could have used the big soft box and studio strobe that we had but the problem with that was it was to powerful and it would overpower the background light. The lowest setting on that flash would have got me a f11 and I would have to drag my shutter to about 2 seconds to get the background in. So what I did was to set my on camera to 1/8 power and pointed it straight up (in the vertical format it would point to left.) Then all I needed was something to bounce the flash off of. There was a guy that we were using for security and he had a white shirt and a broad back. So I had him stand just to left of me with his back to me and used him as a bounce board. Now in hindsight I wish I bought a big foam core or a pop open reflector but this was a good improvisation. I also made sure that the model was walking in a pretty dark area so she would not blur to much. You can see a little blurring on the edges but I really like that.
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ALOHA

Aloha and thanks for stopping by the Hawaii photo workshop Blog. My name is John Chisholm and I teach a photo class in Hawaii at my studio and on location.
What I am trying to do here on this Blog is show some simple and not so simple photo techniques in straight forward steps. Please check the Blog often as I will be adding new examples every week. I hope you get a lot out of this Blog.
Aloha and Happy shooting