How To Chose An F-Stop, What They Are & Why You Need To Know

As part of our "Basic Core Fundamental" classes that we produce thru Alternative Focus, we always cover the 4-Fundamentals; Shutter-Speed, ISO, Composition & today - Aperture - What it is and how, along with why to use it.


Aperture settings are an important tool that you'll need to learn when you want to control the 'Depth of Field', which is, how much of the scene, from front to back is in focus - or actually, is out of focus, drawing your viewers eye to part of the scene that is important, while creating a soft diffused background.


From time to time, in order to provide you with some variation from my writing, along with different ideas, I'm going to start testing the idea of including articles written by others in my blog. I'm also combining my writing between this and my Alternative Focus blog as practice to when we expand our services, which will include newer web-sites, newer workshops and new services - Stay tuned to learn more as we unfold all of these new ideas.


In the mean-time, to read more about F-stops go here:

http://alternativefocus.blogspot.com/2011/01/how-to-choose-f-stop-and-why.html

Intimate Detail in Outdoor Photography

Hello again,
From time to time, my posts will include links to other articles that I find educational, informative and/or of course, humorous too.
Comment below or on my Facebook, your thoughts on this or anything else about this site - Pros & Cons, so that I can make it even better.
Here is one of my first links:


The process of making an image of magic and mystery

Intimate Detail - Outdoor Photographer

Ratios, Fractions and Light Balance

Hello,

I was thinking of putting together a quick post on how to balance Flash vs Ambient light, as that's one of the things I've been studying.

Turns out there can be a lot of math involved, which is fine for me as I excelled in my Math & Science classes.

But then I came across a study that shows... "4 out of 3 people have trouble with fractions".

I think I'll wait.

White Balance Tools

Hello again,

I did a post on my Flickr page recently and one of my images still had my Spyder Cube in it as a Grey Card" reference - Which prompted questions on: "WHY?"

So, here's a quick explanation.

All lighting sources have different color temperatures to them. From warm sunlight to yellowish/green fluorescents and blueish tungsten incandescent bulbs. You want to get your White Balance set so that white colors in your image are actually white and not tinted to some other yellow/green/blue shade. With your camera on Auto White Balance, it's going to try and do this for you - Notice I said "try". Generally they do OK, but for accuracy you use a Grey Card. And shot RAW if possible.

Essentially, you're using the black, white and grey areas as a 'known reference' colors in a scene. Most photo processing software such as Photoshop and Lightroom have an Eyedropper tool that allows you to click on a "Grey Card" to set your White Balance - You're telling the software that this is a known, calibrated 18% Grey color, it will then calibrate the rest of the colors to match. You can also use in either Levels or Curves the Black, Grey and White Eyedroppers to set what are called "Black Point & White Point".

Once you've done that for the image with the cube or grey card in it, you save those settings, then when you open up any of the other images with the same lighting, just paste those settings to them (depending on which software you're using) and this allows you to batch process photos for proper White Balance and Exposure.

Now, in this image I've not only left the Spyder Cube in (just for fun), I've also done some extra tweaking of colors too. Go to my Flickr link to see the rest of the set - Playing with toys.

Here's a link to DataColor's tutorials on how to use the Spyder Cube. 

spyder.datacolor.com/learn_videos.php

Next post, which is coming up soon, will be on Night Photography.

Thanks again for coming by and reading my blog.