Michelle talked herself into setting it up yesterday. Cleverly, she Josiah-proofed the decorations (they start halfway up the tree). Just as cleverly, Josiah noticed vulnerabilities in our new lounge room layout, and promptly found no less than three ways to climb onto the top of our coffee table. Impressive!

Anyway, in response to a question on our Facebook page, here are some tips on getting creative with photos of Christmas lights this December.

For starters, here’s our Christmas tree (shot on my Olympus E-P1):

There’s nothing particularly special about this photo, but I’m hoping it demonstrates that taking out-of-focus photos of light sources can be a lot of fun! You don’t need a fancy camera, either.

There are a few tricks to bear in mind:

• To get circles of light, use your camera’s manual controls and set your lens to its widest aperture (the smallest aperture/f-stop number available). Smaller apertures (bigger numbers) will give you polygons of light.
• For the most dramatic effects, use a lens with a wide aperture (e.g. a 50mm f/1.8, if you own one), or the longest optical zoom your camera offers.
• If you have a foreground subject you’d like to keep in focus, put as much distance as possible between your subject and the lights, and as little distance as possible between you and your subject. It’s all about getting maximum blur out of the lights. Also, you might want to try using flash to illuminate your foreground subject.
• If you don’t have a foreground subject, you’ll need to use manual focus to get maximum blur. Focus as close to the camera as possible. If your camera doesn’t allow manual focus, hold your hand in front of the lens and press the button halfway until your hand is in focus. Then remove your hand and push the button the rest of the way.
• Experiment with focussing at different distances from the camera. The circles of light will change size.
• For best results, shoot at night and use a tripod

Have fun!

Ask me anything about photography – gear, lighting, post production, business, whatever – and I’ll do my best to answer you in an upcoming “workshop wednesday” post. Send your questions by email, Twitter or Formspring, or via a comment on the blog

Today we’re looking at split toning, which I sometimes use to change the colour of my photographs. As usual, I’ll step you through how I’ve processed a recent photo.

(Incidentally, I’m still using Adobe Lightroom for all of my post production, but I’m in the process of moving to Lightroom 3, which I’ve found to be a worthy upgrade.)

Here’s a photo from Ashlee and John’s wedding, as it looked straight out of camera.

First I did my usual white balance and tone adjustments, as shown here:

Which, with a tiny bit of straightening, gave me this:

It’s now quite a usable photo, but I was going for something a little more moody, so I pulled out one of my split tone presets. Here are the settings stored in the preset:

You’ll notice that I’ve pulled the first saturation slider down to -50. That’s to reduce the amount of colour provided by the photo, because we’re adding colour using the split toning controls. This often needs to be tweaked for a particular photo, but in this case it’s fine as-is.

This brings us to Lightroom’s split toning panel, which is confusing at first, but easy enough to master with a little practice!

First, it’s important to understand that a “split tone” allows you to tint your photo with two colours. One colour is applied to the brightest parts of your photo (the “highlights”), and the other is applied to the darkest parts (the “shadows”). Use the “Hue” sliders to choose your colours (press Alt while dragging to make it easier), and the “Saturation” sliders to control just how much of those colours are added to your photo. Finally, use the “Balance” slider to manage which colour you want more of.

The hardest part is choosing a split tone that looks good! I suggest you spend some time experimenting, and build a collection of split tone presets that you like.

Here’s how mine came out:

And finally, with a vignette:

Done!

If you found that helpful, please share it around, and don’t forget to send in some questions for me to answer next week

Anyway, it’s now two weeks late, but here’s my long-awaited intro to black and white post production. And there’s a whole hour of Wednesday left as I start writing this, so it TOTALLY counts as a workshop wednesday

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of different ways to convert a colour image to black and white. Just ask Google. Seriously. There’s a whole world of possibilities out there!

My approach, as always, is simple, Lightroom-based and not particularly earth-shattering. I hope it helps you figure out an approach that works for you

Here’s a colour image, straight out of camera, from Ainslie and Rohan’s wedding:

It looks OK in colour, but to my mind, the long shadows are begging for black and white treatment. This is the end result I was going for:

And here’s how I got there (just using Lightroom’s Develop module):

1. White balance: avoiding proper colour correction by converting to black and white makes for crappy black and whites. Don’t be lazy! For this photo, I set my colour temperature to 7000 with a tint of +15.
2. Grayscale treatment: I have Lightroom configured to apply an automatic grayscale mix as soon as I convert from colour to grayscale (Preferences > Presets). Usually it does a pretty good job (assuming my white balance is correct ), but occasionally I might darken the greens, lighten the reds or make other minor adjustments. In this case, I didn’t override Lightroom’s defaults.
3. Tone: Again, I usually start by auto-toning my photos, and tweaking from there. For this photo, I made the following adjustments:

   * Exposure: 0
   * Recovery: 34
   * Fill Light: 14
   * Blacks: 10
   * Brightness: +109
   * Contrast: +100

4. Vignette: Finally, I applied a vignette to further draw attention towards Ainslie and Rohan.

Voila! A pretty dramatic-looking black and white I hope you found that useful … if so, please spread the word!

1. I have too much post production to get through today.
2. It’s my mum’s birthday, so I can’t work back tonight. (Not that I’m a big fan of working back anyway.)
3. Doug Boutwell from Get Totally Rad released a new set of Lightroom presets last night. I’ve been busy checking them out.
4. Bobby Earle has already posted a before and after using a beta of the presets. It’s worthy of the time you were planning to spend reading my post production post.

Incidentally, I haven’t bought the presets yet. I’m not sure if I will, either … they look awesome, but I’m pretty happy with my own Lightroom presets at the moment. I’ll let you know. Either way, if you’re a Lightroom user, you should totally check them out. All the Totally Rad action sets and presets are well worth the cost.

I’ll do my black and white post next week!

I’ve chosen a random photo from a recent shoot, and I’m going to show you how I moved from my “straight out of camera” image on the left, to the processed image on the right.

Note: for some reason, the “before” image has a vignette on it. It shouldn’t. Imagine it’s not there

A few points before we begin:

• You may or may not like this particular photo, or the way I’ve processed it. That’s fine! I hope you’ll get something out of my approach anyway.
• My approach to post production is just what works for me. Figuring out what works for you will take time. Be patient, and don’t waste time trying to imitate me or anyone else.
• To improve your photos, become a better photographer. Post production can only do so much

With that out of the way, let’s open our photo in Lightroom’s Develop module.

As you can see, the develop settings are all at their default values, and the photo is looking pretty dull and lifeless. Let’s starting by fixing up the white balance (WB).

How did I know to choose that particular white balance? Experience and taste, mostly. You’ll get the hang of it by practising

What I usually do next is click the “Auto” button in the Tone panel. Lightroom then guesses how best to tone the image. It’s never a perfect guess, but it can be a good starting point, unless Lightroom gets confused by strong backlighting or something else.

From there, I tweak the tone sliders to my taste. Again, knowing how best to do this with your photos and to your taste will come with a lot of practise. (And then, if your taste is anything like mine, it will change )

Finally, I usually add a vignette, and I’m done

Obviously there’s more to it when it comes to black and whites and duotones, but we’ll talk about those another day

I hope that was helpful! If it was, please let me know in the comments and tell your friends about workshop wednesdays. That way I’ll know to keep doing it for you

Oh, and please keep asking questions for me to answer on workshop wednesdays!

I’m often asked how I process my photos, and this will be a topic I’ll return to in the coming weeks, but for now, I’ll give you the one-word answer:

Lightroom.

Ok, I’ll say a little more than that Lightroom is one of the products in Adobe’s Photoshop family. You can buy it without buying Photoshop, and if you’re the sort of photographer who likes to get it right in camera and make minimal changes to your photos afterwards, you might not even need Photoshop (which is much more expensive). Then again, if you own Photoshop and don’t need/want the catalog and workflow smarts of Lightroom, the exact same photo processing tools are available to you via Adobe Bridge and Adobe Camera Raw, both of which come with recent versions of Photoshop.

Aside from occasional experiments with a few Photoshop actions (none of which I love enough to use every day, although there is some fun to be had with Doug Boutwell’s Totally Rad Actions), none of my photos leave Lightroom. All of my photo processing is done in Lightroom’s Develop module. Most of my “look” comes from getting the right white balance and my particular approach to manipulating the tone sliders. The rest comes from a small collection of split toning presets I’ve built up, and obsessive attention to detail (which means I rarely “batch process”, despite trying to speed things up that way).

In coming weeks I’ll post specific examples of how I get the look I’m after out of my photos. No time to post one today, sorry!

But to pretty up the post, here’s a sneak peek of a portrait session with another of Josiah’s potential wives, Charlotte

As Michelle would happily tell you, I’m not the best person to ask. The number of changes I’ve made to my equipment line-up over the years is pretty much legendary. So I usually suggest a camera like the Canon 500D or 50D and a lens like the Sigma 17-70mm, and leave it at that.

That said, I’ve settled on a kit that works for me, and the essentials of it haven’t changed for a while, so for my third instalment of workshop wednesday, here’s an attempt to tell you about the 3 lenses I love the most, and why.

Bear in mind that I use these lenses on full-frame cameras like the Canon 5D, so if your camera has a smaller sensor, they’ll behave differently, e.g. the 24mm lens will feel more like a 35mm lens.

primes vs. zooms

All of my favourite lenses are primes, meaning they only have one focal length, i.e. no zoom ring. They’re less versatile than zooms, but they have wider apertures that pass substantially more light through to the camera, they perform better optically, they’re lighter, smaller and less obtrusive, and I like the fact that they force me to have a more decisive vision for each photograph.

Most of the primes I own are very expensive (around $2000 each), but there are cheaper options available; in fact, if you want great quality optics and can’t afford to buy a pro-grade zoom lens, it’s worth picking up a few cheap primes instead. I’ll recommend some below

canon vs. nikon

I use Canon, so I’ll be talking about Canon lenses. Nikon produce similar equipment, but I’m not very familiar with it, so Nikon shooters will have to look up the equivalents themselves. I’d apologise, but I’m not really sorry … we both know you should have bought a Canon

(totally kidding)

favourite #1: Canon 50mm f/1.2L

cheaper alternative: Canon 50mm f/1.4
or even cheaper, but with poor autofocus: Canon 50mm f/1.8

I love my 50/1.2 because it’s so capable in low light (there’s not much you can’t do at ISO 6400 with this lens wide open!), plus the “normal” 50mm focal length is pretty flattering, while being wide enough to set the scene behind my subjects. There’s also the crazy shallow depth of field you can get at f/1.2

It’s my primary lens in low-light scenarios, or whenever I feel the need for a 50mm lens. If there’s plenty of light, I’ll often stop it down to f/1.6 or f/2.0, to get a slightly sharper photo with minimal purple fringing (a common problem with fast primes). Otherwise, I shoot it wide open.

I used my 50/1.2 for this photo from Matt and Kelly’s wedding. It was shot at f/2.0.

favourite #2: Canon 24mm f/1.4L

cheaper alternative: Canon 28mm f/1.8

First, a confession: sometimes I cheat on this lens with my 35mm f/1.4L There are occasions (e.g. when shooting larger groups) when the 24mm’s distortion is undesirable, and if I can only take one lens with me, the 35mm wins (being between 24mm and 50mm).

Otherwise, I love this lens to bits. It’s a wide angle that opens up to f/1.4 … that alone is all kinds of cool! It’s also incredibly sharp (even wide open), and it takes in so much of a scene that it’s a great storytelling lens.

It does force you to work quite close to your subjects, which can be challenging as a documentary photographer, and as with all wide angle lenses (even more so with ultrawides), it’s easy to miss things when composing your photos. But the rewards are worth it.

Here’s another photo from Matt and Kelly’s wedding, taken with the 24mm at f/2.0. I’d share other examples, but these are what I have on my computer at the moment!

favourite #3: Canon 135mm f/2L

cheaper (but shorter) alternative: Canon 85mm f/1.8

I used to prefer my 70-200mm zoom lens as a telephoto, and I do still use it occasionally, but now I much prefer my 135mm prime. It’s faster, lighter and less scary-looking. It’s also significantly cheaper

I use it for tight documentary images, e.g. of individuals or small groups, and for close-ups or maximum background blur when shooting formals. I shoot it wide open almost always. It’s that sharp!

Here’s a pair of candids, again from Matt and Kelly’s wedding, taken with the 135mm at f/2.

Well there you have it: the 3 lenses I can’t live without! I usually just take these 3 and my 45mm tilt-shift on portrait shoots.

Hopefully this post was useful to someone … if so, please let me know in the comments and tell your friends about it!

Oh, and please excuse the dodgy photos of the lenses themselves … I’m trying to make these posts more “visual”

That said, there is some useful info about the business side of photography in yesterday’s post (and the comments others have left), so hopefully that will tide you over until next week, when I’ll tell you about my favourite lenses

I’ve received a tonne of questions to answer over the coming weeks, but for today I thought I’d follow up on last week’s post on backlighting. Some of you wanted more information on how to achieve accurate exposure, so here goes

Choosing an exposure that is both correct and creative is a pretty big topic (the first few weeks of our upcoming photography course will be devoted to it!), but one aspect of setting exposure that is often overlooked is your camera’s metering mode.

To figure out how to expose a scene with varying degrees of brightness in it, you and your camera need to work together to decide which parts of the scene are important, and how bright or dark they should be. Today, we’re looking at how to tell your camera which parts of the scene are important, which is basically what you’re doing when you set your metering mode.

My cameras have 4 metering modes. I use Canon, so if you’re using a different brand, you might need to find your camera manual and translate

1. Evaluative: In this mode, your camera will map out the bright bits and dark bits in your scene, compare it with its database of similar scenes, do some fancy maths, and tell you what it thinks will look good. Most of the time, it will do a pretty good job of compensating for backlight, highlights like light sources and reflections from the sun, etc., but sometimes it won’t see the photo in the same way you do. That’s when you’ll need to use exposure compensation.
2. Centre-weighted average: This mode is pretty much as it sounds. It will expose for the entire scene but give priority to whatever you put in the centre of the frame. I’ve never used it, mostly because my style of photography involves allowing some parts of the scene to be completely over-exposed (if necessary).
3. Partial and spot: In these modes, your camera will expose for a small area at the centre of your frame, ignoring everything else. The only difference between partial and spot is that spot metering covers a smaller area. Your camera might not have spot metering, in which case you’ll need to make do with partial.

So, which metering mode is best? It depends, really Partial and spot metering give you the most control, but they’re not very forgiving if you use an auto-exposure mode like P, Tv or Av and forget to lock exposure on your subject before recomposing. Evaluative metering can be a bit unpredictable, but it’s usually smart enough to choose a pretty good exposure, so it works well with auto-exposure modes. Spot metering can be very difficult, but it will force you to learn how to expose different subjects very precisely, which will improve the consistency of your results.

Whichever mode you choose, make sure you understand it, and remember that even with a suitable metering mode, your camera still won’t know whether it’s seeing something light or dark! That’s where you need to come in and apply exposure compensation as needed.

If you found this helpful, please let us know in the comments! Keeping asking questions, too … I’ll get to them all eventually

Also, if you’d like to learn more, don’t forget to check out our Newcastle photography course, and register your interest. Even if you don’t live in Newcastle, get in touch … if there’s enough demand, we’ll look at launching an online course too.

=====

Here’s another shot of Josiah from Christmas

That said, with so many people wanting to know what I know, and my desire to help people become better photographers, I’m launching “workshop wednesdays” here on the blog. Every Wednesday, I’ll try to post something useful for photographers – amateurs, pros and aspiring pros alike. This will be where I’ll answer your questions, so if there’s anything you’d like to know, go ahead and ask! I don’t believe in keeping secrets You can ask me about technique, lighting, post production, equipment … whatever, really! Send in your questions by email, on twitter, or just leave a comment here on the blog

Our first question comes from Michelle (not the one I’m married to!), who hopefully won’t mind me quoting her

Luke, those awesome shots you do with the sunlight streaming behind the family, not quite flare shots but nearly…..any pointers on how to start doing those?

Here are a couple of recent photos matching Michelle’s description:

As with the vast majority of my photos, these were shot with available light. I do occasionally add flash to backlit photos; it really depends on how well my subjects are lit by the light coming into the photo from behind me. Usually I prefer to find somewhere with nice front light rather than resorting to flash

Obviously for the sun to be in these photos, they need to be taken late in the afternoon (or early in the morning). Available light is most flattering at these times, anyway, which is why I try to arrange my sessions to be nowhere near midday!

When you’re including the sun in the frame (or keeping it just out of frame), there’s a danger your photo will flare out if you’re not careful. Sometimes I like to embrace flare in all of its ethereal glory, but usually I try to block part of the sun with a tree (or even a face) to hold more detail in the shot. Camera placement can be critical to minimising flare, so make sure you have a steady hand!

Finally, and I can’t emphasise this enough, accurate exposure is your friend. If you’re trusting your camera to set your exposure for you, it’s going to be confused by the brightness of the sun, and you’ll end up with very under-exposed subjects. Put your camera in manual mode, expose for the people in your photo, and let the background blow out. Accurate exposure is your friend.

I hope that was helpful! If you liked it and would like to see me keep sharing info on Wednesdays please let me know in the comments!