Okay, enough of you asked about what settings I used when I photographed our Christmas tree, that I figured sharing them would make a fun post! And I’m not the only one who gets to share today. Keep reading!

To shoot our tree, I waited until sundown. Then, I made sure all of our lights were out in the house, save one tiny one behind me in the kitchen. I grabbed my lens that has the lowest f/stop capability.

I also found that I got the best shot when I used evaluative metering mode. Don’t know what that is? Maybe you need to take one of my photography classes in January (dates being announced soon)! Wink, wink. I have started covering metering modes in the advanced camera class, what they are and how to best use them to your advantage. Of course, you could always Google it. Free, though not nearly as fun!

Anyway, I stood in the open doorway between the living room and kitchen and took a bunch of photographs. In the above shot of our tree, my focal length was 85 mm. I set my ISO to its highest setting, 6400. My aperture was 2.8. I set my shutter speed to 1/60th of a second, which is rather slow, but I needed it to stay open long enough to get enough light in. Here is what happened when I had the other settings the same, but had first used a quicker shutter speed:

This is a shot of the tree at a 1/1250th of a second. Everything else was the same. It was way too dark. So I made the shutter speed a little faster and took this shot:

Better but still not the look I was going for. For this photograph, I used 1/640th of a second for my shutter speed. Finally, I made the shutter speed even slower (though not too slow as to cause me to have a blurry photograph) and got the shot I ended up loving the best:

Man, the “you can get a discount if you chop down any of these trees in our leftover field” Christmas tree and clearance Target curtains and eclectic collection of ornaments and worn farmhouse floors look pretty smashing in this photograph, if I do say so myself!

So now it’s your turn. Take a photograph of your own Christmas tree to share with us! If you’d like, post it to your blog and link up that post here so we can all go check out your mad (or not) photography skills and awesome (or adorably Charlie Brownish) tree! Feel free to leave out the, ahem, exhaustive photographic rhetoric if you want. I even enabled “likes” on the list so that those of us looking at all the Christmas trees can hit “like” for the tree photos we enjoyed the most.

I’ll leave this linky open until Christmas so as many of you as would like to can add the link to your tree post. If you need helping photographing your tree, just try setting your camera to its highest ISO setting, lowering your f/stop as low as you can and using a slightly slow shutter speed. You will need to be in Manual mode to do this. Don’t know how? Then just turn your flash off and go for it anyway…and then, take my basic photography class next month. Hehe. Or, I have an even easier idea for how you can learn the basics of photography!

And it’s almost ready. Just a little bit longer. And then I’ll be able to share.

Ahhh, the anticipation that is Christmas is really fun, isn’t it. Snicker, snicker.

If you’re anything like me, you are stranded at a campground in Dallas and currently typing on a computer with a sleeping kitten on your left foot.

Also, if you’re anything like me, you hate to use a flash when you take photographs. I can’t bring myself to do it. I am purely a natural light photographer, using only available light when I shoot.

That is all fine and good when taking pictures of someone on an overcast day. Yes, clouds are great for shooting portraits! But when I shoot from sun up to sun down, as I often do during my marathon photoshoot days like in Dallas this past weekend or Phoenix before too long, I encounter lighting issues. Sometimes, it’s dark and dreary and there isn’t much available light. Other times, the sun is bright and hot in the middle of the day without a cloud to be seen, casting harsh shadows onto the faces I’m trying to photograph. And then there are instances when I want my subject backed up against a neat blue wall or a textured building. When it is dark and shadowy by said wall or building, I’m up a creek without a paddle, since I refuse to use my flash.

Except, I’m not.

After my cameras and lenses, there is one other little piece of photographic equipment that I could not live without. Well, I wouldn’t want to at least.

It’s my reflector.

You remember the one, right? The one that sank to the bottom of a pond in North Carolina this spring, sending me fishing for it during a break between shoots? Yeah. That’s the one. I use it during almost all of my photoshoots. But I’ve neglected to tell you about what an awesome piece of equipment it is. It makes a big difference in my photography.

Today I finally thought I’d tell you how!

No one taught me how to use a reflector. (No one taught Small Fry how to carry it during my photoshoots for me, either. She just rocks like that.)

And me? I’m sort of a self taught girl myself. But I wish someone would have taught me. Since I lack the power to be able to turn back time (though I’m working on it!), I’ll just teach you instead. You’re welcome. Please feel free to pay me in the form of gallons and gallons of coconut water.

It’s super hot here in Dallas. And we’re stuck here. With no vehicle. I’m sorry, have I mentioned that? Our car is in the shop, and our RV is a pull-behind. While we’re stranded at the campground, choosing to be happy about our little, ahem, detour, let me show you how to get rockstar light on the faces of your photographic subjects.

Random sweet teenage boy who comes up to you and offers to be your assistant optional. Though very appreciated.

When you are shooting without using a flash, which I like to do because I can’t stand the fakeness and harshness that can come with the territory, using a reflector can offer some great lighting help. A reflector is a huge, bendy disc. It folds up into a nice round package, not unlike a swim raft or windshield sun cover.

There is a gold and silver zippered cover that goes on a reflector. When that metallic cover is off, the reflector is a giant diffuser. I use it all the time when shooting at midday in the sun. I simply hold (or have an available mom or dad whose child I am photographing) hold the diffuser above the subject in a way that creates shade on the face instead of direct sun. When the sunlight is filtered through the soft white of the diffuser, the results are gentle and gorgeous. No need to look for a tree for shade; with a diffuser, I create my own.

More often than not, though, I have the metallic cover zipped on my reflector. When I have my subject in an area, next to a dark wall for example, where the light is not great, I grab it.

A reflector does just that: It reflects light. Often, there is perfect soft light from the sun or just the ambient light in the area on one side of my subject’s face. Too often, though, the other side, or maybe the underside of the chin, is too dark for my tastes. In those moments, I have either the person I am shooting herself, or a friend, family member or my own left arm hold the reflector so that it’s facing the darkened side of the face. I twist and bend the reflector a bit until the light from it bounces right where I want it. Then, snap!

Here is a gorgeous young woman I photographed in Texas not too long ago. This is her near a wall I liked with no reflector being used. Not bad. Not bad at all. But I knew I could do better.

First, I held up the gold side of my reflector near the left side of her face. The result below was a bit too drastic for me, although I loved the warmth of the gold side. That’s the side of my reflector I use most often.

Then I turned my reflector around and pointed the silver side her way. Nice, as you see below, but I decided my reflector was just a little too near her face. And I didn’t love how she looked against the blue wall as much as I thought I would.

So we moved locations and tried again. This gal had gorgeous warm skin and hair, so I picked some natural wood (it was the outside wall of a public restroom in a park, actually!) for our next shot. There was ambient light on both sides of her face, yet the underside of her nose and chin were a bit dark. Handing her the reflector and asking her to hold it gold side up at her waist so that light bounced upwards onto her face worked perfectly.

Here is one of the shots we got.

No shadows. Lovely, smooth, glowing skin. And a perfect example of why I love my reflector. You can get one of your own right here. Using a reflector is a simple way to help you get the most of your available light when you shoot, whether you use a huge SLR camera with a mega lens or just a tiny, pocket-sized point and shoot.

Hope you liked the photography lesson. See you around! Since, you know, this is my blog and all.

If it’s early morning or very late afternoon, one of my very favorite things to do when photographing is dramatically backlight my subject and shoot them. With my camera.

Not only is backlighting, lighting your subject from…you guessed it…the back, a great way to give your photographs a dramatic look, but there’s more: It’s a super easy technique that requires no special equipment and that anyone from folks with fancy schmancy cameras all the way down to basic point and shoots can use!

Ready to hear how to give your photos a boost from behind?

If so, cross your eyes and stick out your tongue like this silly girl, click your heels together three times and say, “In praise of the backlit photograph.”

Done?

Great. Let’s move on.

First, wake up when the sun is rising. Or, wait until the sun is almost setting. Either way. Go outside with your photographic subject. Position your subject with the sun, or the direct sunlight if you can’t see the actual sun, right behind them. It must be right behind them. If they move, or you do, or the sun does earth does, you will get a huge flare across their face. Not cool.

Make sure that there is ambient light around you, too. This means don’t stand in the shadows or right in front of a tree, large shrub or house. Why? Because light needs to be able to reflect onto the front of your subject’s face so they are well lit and we can see them! If you have an available fill flash or softbox or something, you can use that if you can’t get or don’t want to use ambient light around you. I often use a reflector to bounce outdoor light back onto my subject’s face, too. Reflectors are bendy, versatile, durable and easy to use.

Set your camera to spot metering. This way, your camera won’t take the average of all the light it’s sensing and overcompensate, making your subject’s face dark. We want the camera to take just the information off our subject’s face and adjust appropriately. Don’t know how to use spot metering? Google it or consult your camera’s manual for instructions specific to what you shoot with. Don’t want to get that involved? Just choose your own adventure and skip ahead to page 71.

Page 71:

To get the exposure right for a backlit photograph without changing your camera to spot metering, use your lens to zoom in on your subject’s face. This trick only works if you’re using an SLR camera, by the way. If you are using a point and shoot or for any other reason don’t want to use this technique, choose your own adventure by skipping ahead to page 94. After you have zoomed in on your subject’s face, look at your camera display to see what settings it’s giving you. Switch your camera to Manual (M) mode and dial in those exact settings. Now you’re ready to shoot.

Page 94:

If you don’t have the experience, time or interest in doing the above steps to get the right exposure, just try a ton of different angles. That’s what I did today and yesterday with the two shots in this post.

I got close, took a few, zoomed out, took a few more. Tipped up, tipped down. Trial and error is how I work a lot of the time. In cooking. In life. With parenting. And as it relates to photography. But that’s just me. I know there are lots of you recipe types out there.

And if you are one of those people who likes recipes and tutorials, specifically of the photographic variety, here are links to some of my other photography lesson posts. Enjoy!

Understanding ISO:

Reducing noise in your photographs.

Kick up the color, baby:

Boosting color in photographs.

Photos too yellow? Too blue?

White balance: Getting the right color to your photographs as you’re taking them.

Step by step instructions to creating a country bumpkin type edit using Lightroom:

Giving your photos a country feel.

Posted by my dear friend and photography mentor:

Using angles to your advantage.

Thanks to my friend A for letting me showcase her daughter S:

Boosting eyes using Photoshop.

Stellan was so little in this post:

Antiquing your photos using texture.

Using the concrete on our driveway:

More fun with texture overlays.

How I converted some photographs of a bride into high contrast black and white:

Killer black and white photographs.

Setting your focus points and using them to your advantage:

Using focus creatively.

I used to get asked about burry backgrounds 17 times a day. No longer:

How to make the background in your photographs look blurry!

Photography geek info: I took the photos in this post with my brand new Canon 5D Mark II camera (Which shoots full frame! I am loving it!) and my Canon 24-70 f/2.8 lens.

A little about both. But mostly (thank goodness) the latter.

I think like an artist. I can’t help it. Sometimes I see a color on a passing Suburban on the road and I dream of using it to create a custom paint to finish a bathroom. I’ve been known to take a snapshot of a friend’s shoe with my phone so I can remember the pattern for a sketch later. I dream in rainbows and see patterns when I close my eyes.

And textures? Don’t get me started on textures! Oh, okay, fine. Go ahead and get me started.

The other day, when I was snapping this photograph of Small Fry, I happened to take the following photograph of my shadow on the pavement beneath the four wheeler.

Upon seeing the accidental photograph, I did what any good artist would do: I deleted it to save room on my memory card. I saved it with the intention to use it to create something later. What did I end up creating?

Why, this, this and this:

How did I do it? Here’s how. You can join in the texture fun, too!

First, I opened the shot of the concrete in Lightroom. Oh, how I am addicted to Lightroom. (I’m giving away a brand spanking new Lightroom 3 on my blog very soon, by the way. To one of you! So look alive.)

Using the crop tool, I selected a part of the photograph with a relatively consistent texture. Crop!

Here is what I got after cropping:

Then, also in Lightroom, I played around with the lighting. Using the White Balance (labeled WB at the top of your right side tool bar) toggles, I slid the temperature up a bit, to make the texture warmer. I upped the clarity and contrast, too. Here is what I ended up with.

I saved that image (as Concrete2 if you really want to know) to my computer. Then, I opened up Photoshop. I started with this SOOC* shot of Nuggey the other day. (*Straight out of the Camera, meaning this photograph had not been edited in any way yet.)

Isn’t he a sweetie? Poor little guy was sliding on the hallway floors late last night with our pastors’ kids after small group and face planted and split the inside of his lip wide open. Our pastor rocked Flurry to sleep and put him in his bassinet himself. My husband tended to Nuggey who, surprisingly, wasn’t the least bit upset, even at the sight of all the blood, after the initial impact. We ended up deciding he probably didn’t need stitches, sent our pastor’s family home and got everyone else to bed. Nuggey looks pretty darn cute and tough today with his fat lip, which he is showing off to anyone who will look. Which, so far, just consists of everyone in our family, but later will probably include the folks at the camera store because my main camera has been repaired and is ready!!!

Ahem.

Next, I converted the photograph to a high contrast black and white image. I explained how I do that in this post. Yes, I went back to Lightroom to do the black and white edit. I’m anal a big attention to detail freak like that.

Okay, back to Photoshop, with the black and white image of Nuggey opened. It’s a sweet photo, very smooth and crisp. But I wanted it to have a little bit of an edge.

So, under file, I dragged my cursor down to place. A box opens, letting me search my computer for an image to place over the top of the photo of Nuggey. I select, you guessed it, Concrete2.

Presto! It’s placed.

I grab the edges of the texture photograph and drag them to the edges of Nuggey’s photo, completely covering it.

Now comes the fun part. By placing, I have created a new layer on top of my original layer. In the right hand side of your Photoshop workspace, you’ll now see both layers. Currently, the textured layer is selected. See how it’s highlighted with light blue? Now, there’s a little arrow I drew (I have no idea how it got cropped off, but I’m way too lazy to go fix it at this point.), and it’s pointing to a spot that says opacity. Next to that is a box where you can change the % opacity. Initially, it is set to 100%. But as I slid the toggle to the right, making my concrete layer less opaque, I can start to see sweet Nuggey peeking through! See?

I went on to lower the opacity quite a bit more, so that the result was a delightfully subtle textured overlay. But I didn’t care for the texture right on Nuggey’s face that much.

So, what’s a girl to do? I grabbed my eraser tool (see the arrow pointing to the left sidebar), sized it to how big I wanted it, and then lowered the strength of the eraser by playing with the eraser opacity (see the arrow pointing to the top bar). I think I set it to about 27% or something, but I’m not sure.

Then, I erased most of the texture off of Nuggey’s face, with this as the result:

I loved it! I went on to do this same thing to every photograph in this post of Nuggey holding Flurry, but I made the result a little stronger by keeping the opacity of the texture layer a little higher.

The warm tone I gave my original textured photograph didn’t come into play as I decided to make Nuggey’s photo in black and white. But when using color, especially warm, fall color, I thought the warmer look would work nicely. To make sure, I did the same thing to this photograph of Stellan at a pumpkin patch recently. I let some of the texture stay on his hair and shirt and lightly erased almost all of the texture right on his face.

It turned out great! At least, in my opinion. And, when it comes to art and photography, that is what counts! So, go have yourselves a heyday trying it out. If you do, go ahead and share with me and everyone else how it turned out. I created a thread in my community where you can upload and share your own work! (And talk about textured photographs in general and post questions, too.) It’s right here.

Have fun!!

Oh me, oh my! It has been ages and ages since I posted a photography tutorial to my blog. Well, it was April 20 when I last did, to be exact. And I’m finally posting another one for you today. To be honest, I hesitate to call my posts tutorials, though. With the use of that word, the implication is that I’m a learned scholar who knows what she’s doing. I’m not and I really don’t. But I’ve spent the past five years dabbling around with my cameras and learning as I go the best I can.

Far be it from me to keep the little kernels of knowledge I’ve picked up along the way to myself! I know from reading all of your comments and emails that many of you are interested in photography, too. And, with the continued drop in prices of digital SLR cameras these days, it is becoming easier for more and more folks, who perhaps never originally dreamed of becoming photographers, to get their hands on a nice piece of equipment. Exploring this art form has been one of my favorite hobbies in the past handful of years as well.

Today, I bring you a tutorial all about focus. Often, I get readers asking me how I get my photographs so crisp and clear looking. Well, there is not one simple answer to that. Part of it is the lighting I use (only natural light from a window or outside!), another is the lens I have on at the moment, part of it is how I edit my photographs after I take them, but the first and most important way I get clear photographs like this one I took of our only daughter is what I’m going to discuss with you today.

This technique involves using your camera’s auto focus and focus points to get a super clear shot to begin with. This tutorial applies to anyone with an SLR camera. Those of you with point and shoots only will have to sit this one out, I’m afraid.

I usually, but not always, shoot in auto focus mode (as opposed to manual). The first thing you are going to want to do in order for this tutorial to make sense is locate on the side of your lens a small sliding button that moves between AF and MF. This tells your lens if you will be focusing it yourself (manual focus) or if you’ll be using the camera’s help (auto focus). Slide your lens to AF.

Now, look at the top of your camera. Do you see the round dial that you can turn to select different shooting modes? If you’re newer to photography, you may still have your camera set to that glorious green rectangle or green image of a camera indicating automatic shooting mode. Leaving a camera in its fully automatic shooting mode is a very common way that beginning photographers sometimes get led astray. In a completely understandable fashion, some of you might have assumed that by putting your expensive, fancy DSLR on automatic mode and shooting away, that your pricey piece of equipment should know exactly what to do. After all, that’s what you bought it for, right?

Well, not exactly.

Digital SLR cameras can be the pathway to awesome photography, but they are only as good as the person behind the lens. Yeah, that’s you! So let’s talk about getting the most out of your camera by having it help you get crystal clear photographs. Most digital cameras have a series of pre-set focus points that can help you focus on your subject. Look on your camera for a button that has a symbol that looks something like this on it:

This is a set of focus points. You don’t need to press this button yet. We’ll get to that in a moment. Let me just explain what these points are and how they work first.

Your camera likely has an array of anywhere between 3 and 45 focus points, seen when you look through your viewfinder and press your shutter button partway down in order to focus on your subject. My camera has 9. I’m not convinced that more focus points is always better. I typically only use the same focus point for all of my shots. You will also be able to select either one specific focus point or all of the points at once.

Selecting one point will make your subject crystal clear at exactly the spot where you position that point. When shooting portraits of people, for example, I use my camera to select one focus point and then point that focus point right on my subject’s eye.

Like this:

As I said, I almost always use my camera to select one focus point when shooting. However, there may be a time you select all of the focus points at once. When you do this, your camera will automatically without any help from you, “guess” where to focus. It will probably choose more than one spot to focus on. This might be a good setting for huge crowds of people or landscapes. Since I rarely shoot either of those types of shots, I prefer to keep one point set. After all, if I let my camera pick one automatically (as, just so you know, it always does when you have the green dial set to fully automatic mode) and I’m shooting a person, there is a pretty good chance one of the points will not end up on my subject’s eye. And what is a good portrait of a person if their eye is not in focus!?

Well, unless of course you’re shooting a photograph of a person and you specifically don’t want the eye in focus, like this shot of Stellan’s newborn foot:

So, how do you set the focus point on your camera? Glad you asked.

The method for changing which focus point is set is different for every camera. Your camera’s instruction manual will tell you exactly how to do it on yours. But, if you’re anything like me, you either hate instruction manuals or can’t find yours (or both!). Typically, the ability to manually choose your focus points is only available in aperture-priority (called A or Av), shutter-priority (often marked as Tv or S), manual (M) and program (P) mode.

So, set your camera, using the round dial at the top, to one of these above modes, and not to the fully automatic (green rectangle or green camera) or subject (picture of portrait, action, landscape, close up, etc.) modes. You will first need to make sure you have set your camera to one of the correct exposure modes before you will press the button on your camera to activate the focus point selection.

Is that done?

Okay, now find the focus point button on your camera again. As I said earlier, it will have an icon on it that might look like this:

Go ahead and press this button this time.

Looking at your camera’s display screen, you will see all the focus points. Most cameras will light up the point the camera is set to. Or, it may turn one point red. Either way, you’ll know that is the specific point your camera is currently set to focus on. Your camera probably has uses the focus point in the middle of the viewfinder as the default setting. This is fine if you always want the subject to be in the middle of your photograph. But if you know anything about composition, you’ll know that it is usually more pleasing and interesting to have the subject you are shooting away from the center of the photo.

If this is your plan, you’ll want to have a different point light up, and not the center one.

To do this, after you hit the focus points button and you see one point lighting up, you can change the active focus point by using the four direction buttons on the rear of the camera. You know, the ones with little arrows pointing either up, down, left or right. By hitting these directional buttons, the focus point your camera is set on will change. The active point you have selected at the moment will likely appear on your rear LCD screen and also will be lit up as you look through your viewfinder. As you scroll through all of your options, you’ll see that you can set any one of your (in my case, 9) focus points to be the one that your camera will use, or you can set them all. You know they are set to be all on (in which case your camera will do its best to guess for you where you want to focus…I wouldn’t recommend using this setting very often) when all of them are lit (or, in my camera’s case, red).

Now that you’ve chosen a point you want to use, you can look through your viewfinder and take a picture! Here is one that I shot of Nuggey blowing a huge, puffy weed out on our property recently:

I set the focus point to the far left. See the one that is red? When I shot him, I looked at Nuggey through my viewpoint, pointed that focus point on the weed itself, since that is what I wanted in clearest focus, and shot!

Pretty straightforward, huh? Yeah, MckMama, but what if you want to focus on something that doesn’t line up directly with any of the focus points, no matter what you chose!?

Super question. If that is the case, you can still get a clear shot by using a steady hand and this technique:

Set a focus point. Look through your viewfinder at your subject. Set the selected focus point on the part of your photo you want in focus. Press your shutter button partway until you hear a little beep or a click.

Now your lens is focused on what you just pointed the focus point at, almost no matter what you do with your camera now!! So, just keep your finger on the shutter button, pushed halfway down still, and slide your camera over (and/or up or down) to compose your photo however you want. Now, click!

Even if the focus point is no longer on, say, the eye of your subject, the eye will still be focused since you initially set the focus there!! So this is how I typically shoot. I have one focus point set. I look through my viewfinder, quickly find whatever it is I want to focus on, press the shutter halfway, and then before my subject has a chance to move (this takes practice and patience…you’ll get lots of dud photos that you’ll have to trash, but you will be able to get some awesome, clear as crystal ones, too!) I slide my camera over to how I want the whole photo to look and click!

The important thing is: After you’ve depressed the shutter button and focused on something, you may move your camera up or down, left or right, but you may not move it closer to the subject or further away! If you do that, you focus point will no longer be in focus. Also, you will want to finish clicking the focus button as quickly as you can, since your hand and your subject will probably still be moving slightly.

This technique is easier when you are shooting something that isn’t moving or you are using a tripod.

However, I enjoy using this technique with children and objects in motion because I love a challenge! I get such satisfaction when I manage to grab those hard to capture moments.

And now you can, too!!

THE GIVEAWAY IS NOW CLOSED. Remember this photo? And this one? After I posted these, I got an onslaught of compliments on the way I edited the photographs. It was overwhelming. I’m still digging out from the love letters I received, in fact. Thank you all. You really… What’s that? Oh, okay. There were like [...]

While we are sailing the blue seas, I have asked my friend Kelly, a fantastic photographer who lives in New York and a dear friend of mine I met through blogging years ago, to guest post for me. Kelly is exceedingly talented. I have had the distinct privilege of being mentored by her over the [...]