• Frederiksberg Castle at Sunset
• Tigers Cuddling
• Falling Snow

I am very proud of this because it was a particular and important goal of mine. According to NYIP, the award is given a very small percentage of their students. I won the award for the first three photos I turned in as my Unit 3 photo practical assignment.

This post was originally published on Anna Vera's Photos at Anna’s SLR Photography | NYIP Award of Merit.

The following are some basic how-to tips for how to take a still photography at night (this is mainly for a cityscape or a landscape).

1. Time of day. The time of day to take a night photograph is twilight, after sunset when the sky is still a dark blue color but not black. The photograph will have a definite appearance of nighttime but buildings and trees will show up nicely against the sky instead of fading into inky blackness. This is the time when professional night time photography is taken. You might notice if you look at some postcards sometime.

2. Sky: A clear or mostly clear sky is best if you can possibly get it.

2. Light: As in all photography, you will need a source of light. Your on-camera flash won’t help you here, it only lights up an area a few feet or meters ahead of you – not an entire landscape.

City lights are good. Outside of the city, a full moon is best but a crescent moon might also do, to shed enough light on your scene so that the camera can pick it up.

3. Tripod: You will definitely need to mount your camera on a tripod. Your lens aperture will have to be open for a long enough time to allow sufficient light into the camera and if you hold the camera by hand for that long, your camera shake will create a messy blur.

4. Low ISO (ASA) On most digital cameras, setting a high ISO (which is the indicator of how sensitive the camera is to light) will create a lot of digital noise. (Noise is the annoying ugly dots all over your photo that is so hard to get rid of). Digital noise especially shows up in dark areas of photographs, such as the night sky.

I suggest using an ISO of 100 or 200. If 100 lets in enough light, go for it. Otherwise try with 200. I usually use 200.

5. F-Stop F-Stop is an indicator of how big your camera aperture is. The lower the F-Stop number, the wider the aperture. A wide aperture lets in more light but it also decreases your focal length.

Focal length is the range the photograph that will be in acceptable focus. An example of a narrow focal length would be when everything that is between 10 feet away and 16 feet away from you is in acceptable focus but the rest is blurry.

In some cases you want a short focal length so that you can draw attention to the object you are photographing or drown out a messy, distracting background. But if you are photographing a scene, vista, house, or landscape, you probably want a long focal length.

For a long focal length, try a small aperture such as 16. Remember that different lenses create better images at one F-stop than another. This is a matter of getting to know your lens but if you are a beginner with your camera you don’t need to worry about that a lot right now.

6. Shutter Speed: Your shutter will need to be open long enough to get enough light into your photograph. With a digital camera, I always experiment and then check the image in the LCD screen. For some night time photographs I have kept the shutter open for up to 30 seconds. For others, such a long exposure wasn’t necessary. Remember not to touch or hold your camera during this time, as this will cause camera-shake and blur the photo. Check the photo and then adjust as necessary.

7. White Balance: In film cameras, we had different types of films for different lighting situations such as tungton lights, sunlight, fluorescent lighting, shade, cloudy day, etc. In digital photography, we have white balance. This tells the camera how to treat the colors and shades in the photo so that they turn out correctly (that’s my best way of explaining without going into lots of technical details).

For night time photography I usually use “auto white-balance” but you can experiment with different settings and see what result you like best.

8. Tighten your tripod: There is a little connector that attaches your camera to the tripod . It might seem tight but if the camera is able to weigh it down and move it slightly during the exposure, your photo will be a mess.

8. Summary: For a nighttime vista an example of settings you can start with would be ISO 200, Aperture 16, Shutter Speed 15 seconds. Then adjust as needed to get the exposure you want. You might try F 8 at around 10 seconds. Etc. Check the result in your LCD screen.

When you get what you think is a good exposure, take more than one shot at that exposure so that you can be sure to get a good one. You might try a few at a slightly higher or lower exposure, just in case (this is a long-time practice in professional photography, known as “bracketing.”)

Be patient and take lots of reshoots. When you get home and blow up your photo on a big screen you might notice that one shot was almost perfect but something blurred or there was an unseen tourist walking through the scene at just the wrong moment. Take lots of shots to make sure you get a good one. If the photo is important to you, the time is worth it.

Feel free to browse the photos on this blog for examples of nighttime Digital SLR photography. Please leave comments if there are any questions or if anything in this post was not fully clear to you.

This post was originally published on Anna Vera's Photos at SLR Photography – Taking Pictures at Night.

Idiotic Mistakes to Avoid

Part II

1. Idiotic Mistake:

You go on vacation and leave your battery charger on the other side of the world. When you are just seconds away from taking your best yet photograph, your batteries run out and you have to use your mom’s 5 megapixel Canon Prosumer Camera instead of your own Canon Digital Rebel SLR.

What You Should Do:

Don’t assume “well, I moved everything over from my camera bag to my backpack, so it should all be in there.” As ridiculous as it might sound, make a checklist of what photography equipment you need to bring with you. At least use it when you are traveling far away. Check your checklist when you pack and make sure you have everything.

2. Idiotic Mistake:

You accidentally delete you files from your camera memory card before you have transferred the files to a computer or disk. Then you go right on using that same memory card to take other pictures! Which means you lose your chance of recovering your deleted files. The files on a memory card are recoverable. But once you have overwritten them with new files, recovery becomes impossible.

What You Should Do:

Always carry extra memory cards with you. If you do accidentally delete your pictures, separate out the card with the deleted files and don’t use it. Then find a good file undelete program (which you can find online) and recover your lost files. In many case you will be able to get them back. But only if you haven’t overwritten them. After you have succeeded at your data recovery, you can use your memory card again. _____

I know a girl who violated point 1 above, and wound up having to take portrait photographs of her family, with a point-and-shoot mounted on a tripod. While her Digital SLR rested in its bag, uncharged, she cringed at the discolored shots (due to no white-balance control), difficult focus, unchangeable aperture, and fickle exposure. All because she left her charger in another continent.

I know a girl who violated rule point 2 above, and wound up returning to the mountains of a foreign country to re-shoot the lost photographs. Now I won’t tell you who this girl is. It would embarrass her. But suffice it to say that she is a girl who most people think of as being very smart. If it happened to her, it can happen to you too, so I hope you benefit from this advice.

This post was originally published on Anna Vera's Photos at Idiotic Mistakes to Avoid When You’re Learning Digital SLR Photography: Part II.

Idiotic Mistakes to Avoid if You Want to get Good Pictures

Part 1

1. You take your memory card out of your camera, load your photos onto your laptop, and then stick the card in your camera bag thinking “I’ll just put it in the camera after I answer this phone call.” Then you forget all about it.

The next day you take out your camera to get the photo you’ve been waiting for all week, take several shots, and then see the horrendous message: “No CF Card.” Meanwhile, an enormous ugly cloud has moved in over the castle you are photographing and it stays there for the rest of the day.

What to do: Always, always, always put your CF card directly back into your camera after you have loaded your pictures!

2. Well this is obvious but not obvious enough for some people: You put your batteries in your camera bag instead of directly into the camera. You see the perfect shot, but by the time you’ve realized your battery isn’t in and you’ve finished fumbling around in your camera bag, it’s gone.

What to do: Always put your battery back into your camera immediately after it has finished charging!

3. Even more obvious but frequently done by some: you forget to recharge your batteries. You spend the day climbing the mountain before you realize you are almost out of power and the nearest electrical outlet is 10 miles away.

Or, you put off charging your batteries till the last minute. Then you are about to leave home when you realize you have to do it. While you are waiting for your batteries to charge, the sunset, which you have been planning to photograph, disappears completely.

What to do: always charge your batteries well ahead of time and always put them directly back into the camera when they are finished charging.

4. Okay, less obvious for beginners, but you still feel like it should have been obvious, when you realize you’ve done it: you leave your polarizing filter on at the wrong times. Example: a city scene lit by electrical lighting reflected off of water. It has a sparkle. Leave the polarizing filter on and instead of sparkle you have mud.

What to do: Use your polarizing filter only when necessary. When in doubt, try a photo with it and a photo without it. Check your camera’s image playback to see the best results.

5. Trying to photograph a popular tourist destination during the day. You will soon wish for a police barricade to keep all the bodies out of the picture.

What to do: Photograph very early in the morning, even if it is 3 a.m., and minimize the numbers of bodies your photograph has to compete with. Notice I say “minimize.” On the Charles Bridge in Prague, it is still hard to get a tourist-free shot at 3 a.m. But it is possible, if one really works at it.

________

That’s all for part one. When I remember the other idiotic mistakes which have been made by a friend of mine, I will write them up in Part II.

This post was originally published on Anna Vera's Photos at Idiotic mistakes to Avoid When You’re Learning Digital SLR Photography Part I.

Note: The following post was originally written on my Blogger blog which was called “Annablog Goes Digital.” Since that time, I have moved that blog, and most of its contents, to my current domain, and the blog will be continued here at Anna Vera’s Photos.

Hi there everybody, my name is Anna. This is my first blog and it will be about photography because I’m a photography student.

Now, my photos are not the “wow-oh-my-god-amazing-how-did-she-do-that” type (unless, of course, you’re my mother, in which case everything falls under that catagory). But I will share some of my photos with you and maybe as time goes by we will see if I get any better. First I will tell you a little bit about my photographic history.

The first photograph I every took was very analogue. Why? Well, I think I was about 7, so it would have been 1982 or so, and in those days, we had film. Just film! No digital. Yep, I’m old, I remember when we only had film…

Anyway, my hands moved in a circle while I took the picture and I got this incredible swirling special-effect. Natural talent! These days, we would use a Radial Blur effect in Photoshop to create such a result! But when I was a kid, I didn’t need it.

And then – even when I was a teenager, I was still very analogue. I traveled around Europe and Asia with a little point-and-shoot camera – and I was very unelectronic. I didn’t even take indoor photos, because I didn’t want to bother with batteries for the flash. I also used to avoid taking pictures because I didn’t want to look like a tourist.

Of course, years later and having taken a stronger interest in photography, I just kick myself every time I think of that red Chinese sun rising up above the valley while I stood idly on a mountain top, taking no photos because I didn’t want to look like a tourist!

But those photos I did take, were definitely film, and there were few of them. I was saving film! (We STILL didn’t have digital cameras when I was a teenager – we didn’t even have email! I had to use telegraphs! See? I’m old.)

Times have changed, and I no longer shoot analogue photographs – well, not since I got a digital camera, that is. I guess it’s all for the best, because film costs money. Sometimes I take 400 photos in order to get one good shot – oh, oops, maybe I shouldn’t have told you that.

But anyway, since I went digital I definitely get a lot more practice. And hence the name of my blog! (My dad always told puns when I was growing up, I can’t help myself! I inherited it, it’s not my fault. He even called it “popcorn”… Do you get that?)

Now I have some photos to post here, but unfortunately blogger is not allowing me to do so at the moment. Maybe photo upload services are under maintainence… I will try again later…

So there’s my first entry into my first weblog. I hope I did okay. I will try to make time to come back and add more photos as time goes on…

Love, Anna

This post was originally published on Anna Vera's Photos at Hi Everybody.