This was taken with the 30d and 50mm lens open to 1.8 aperture. SS was 1/125. ISO 1600. I shot this in Manual mode. If you are coming from reading the ISO post above, notice the SS was 125 at ISO 1600. ISO 100 (which is where I told you to start) would have given me a SS of roughly 1/8th of a second. There is NO way I could ever hand hold that.
Here is the unedited, SOOC shot. *Oh this is hard*
WHY did I choose the settings I did?
1 - Why ISO 1600? I did not want to use flash. In fact, I rarely ever use flash indoors*. If I do use flash, I try to use it in such a way that you don't see it, which means NO shadows outlining people. I knew, given the time of day (evening around 6:30pm) and the fact that we only had the overhead lights on, I would need a fairly high ISO. *Exceptions are when I use the P&S camera
2 - Why the 50mm lens? I wanted to get close and I knew I would need to "open" up the aperture.
3 - Why f/1.8? I needed the camera as wide open as it would go (yes, I only invested in the $75 version of this lens. Why I did that is for a whole other post). I also wanted the bokeh (Japanese for blurry I believe) this lens provides at such wide open apertures. I knew, standing across the table from the kids painting that I could focus in on the hand and the body behind it would be out of focus, thus drawing attention to the hand painting.
4 - Why SS 1/125? The "duh" answer is that is the SS that gave me the proper exposure. But really, I need to elaborate on this for you. In all honesty, I could have gone with a SS of 1/60 and been fine hand holding as the lens is a 50mm. If I had done that I could have lowered the ISO to 800 and had less grain, or left it at 1600 and had an image that was over-exposed according to the meter by 1 full stop (and looking above 1 full stop would have been a wee bit too much, but not terribly too much).
Using a 50mm lens, I know that I need to keep my shutter speeds at LEAST longer than the lens length. In this case, I knew to combat my "shakiness" I needed to have a shutter speed of at least 1/50. However, for me, this night I had had too little or too much caffeine and knew I was a little shaky as I normally am. So a SS of 1/125 was close enough to double the lens length I strive for when I'm shaky, and it matched what I needed for the aperture.
Okay, had the proper exposure said I needed a SS of 1/30, I would have known I would probably see camera shake in the final image. It's just too slow to hand hold (especially for me). How could I have changed that SS? There are 2 ways. I could have "opened the aperture wider" and gone to f/1.4 and then my SS would have increased (the question is "to what?"). OR I could have bumped my ISO up to 3200 and increased the SS. There is a relationship between all 3, and you have to understand this to know how you can move the settings for proper exposure.
That's the "technical" behind the photo. Now, you notice, it's nice and pretty YELLOW tinted huh? I did not color balance this image at all prior to shooting. I shoot in RAW format, and this allows me to color correct after the fact (which is honestly a bad habit for me).
Here are my steps for Photoshop and processing my images, well the "basic" processing:
Open in Lightroom/Bridge/Camera Raw and adjust the color. I also adjust any exposure issues I see as well. This one was fairly good to start with, but I think I bumped the shadows slightly. I bumped the saturation levels a tad. Added a tiny bit of "fill light" or "brightness" as I probably should have slightly overexposed according to the in camera meter.
Then, I open in photoshop. I run an unsharp mask filter I have nicknamed "defog" and it basically takes the "fogginess" out of the original image. It slightly sharpens it.
Because I shot it at ISO 1600, I run a filter that takes out the excess noise caused by shooting at such a high ISO.
Then I run a curves action and levels action (boosting both of those). Curves boosts the highlights and colors while the levels boosts the shadows. I then adjust each of those layers to 50%.
For this image, I then cropped according to the rule of thirds - the paint tip is the "interesting" part so I put it on the bottom right 1/3. Think of your image, draw imaginary lines at the 1/3 intervals going both horizontal and vertical. Where they "intersect" are your "best points of interest" to make a photo more interesting.
We ended up with this:
Okay, open that edited version up in a new tab/window by right clicking on it and selecting "open in new". In cropping this one I actually sort of "failed" to get it into the rule of thirds. Why? If you notice, the paint tip brush is NOT in focus. The fingers holding it are in focus. More importantly the knuckles are in focus. Can you see where it falls "out of focus" at all? THAT is how shallow this depth of field is. I was standing about 3 feet away from the hand. If you are going to be standing that close to a child to shoot a photo of their face, then you have to be aware at how easily focus can fall off in the wrong spot. But in the small version, you just don't see the details enough to tell that the tip of the paint brush is so out of focus! ;)
I'll talk about Depth of Field in another post. :) It deserves it's own post.
*Yes, I know the edited version is showing a tad red....LOL yeah, a lot red. I have not gotten the CS4 set to the right colorspace, and this shows it! Off to fix that now.
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