Canon EOS 5D Canon mm IS mm f/9 0.3 sec. ISO 100

Transcription

1 16 Canon EOS 5D Canon mm IS mm f/9 0.3 sec. ISO 100

2 Together Every January, students from the school of dance in our city start preparing the choreography on a common theme, which they perform in June. For six months they train once a week to learn the dances. Last year the theme was The Parisian Subway. Seventeen dance groups, made up exclusively of females ages 5 to 50 years, performed their routines in front of an audience of 300 family and friends. It is important to arrive an hour ahead of the performance to find a seat that has the best vantage point for taking pictures. I like to be positioned at a central location in the middle of the audience. It is important to sit at the same level as the stage. I decided to switch to manual mode so I could precisely adjust the camera. I decreased ISO and aperture to increase shutter speed, and I enabled image stabilization on the lens to absorb vibration. It was difficult to get a good composition because the dancers move quickly and you must anticipate their movements to fit them properly into the frame. In manual mode there will be a lot of bad photos (underexposed, overexposed, totally blurry, subject cropped, and so on). I took a total of 16 images in order to get only one that I liked. As you shoot, you must assess the results on the camera screen, as that is the best way to help find good settings. You must be ready to quickly change your settings due to the frequent lighting changes. How does one make a dynamic picture of a stage performance? Probably by using slower shutter speeds to capture a moving subject. I am happy with this picture because it is a change from the architectural shots I have published before. Even if it is a challenge to get a good result while in manual mode as opposed to the P mode or aperture priority mode I often use it is the best way to create something different and less static. Hints Look carefully at the scene and try to be in tune with your subject. Pay particular attention to lighting and exposure, and in manual mode find the best settings so that the subject is not too blurry or too static. view the camera screen to assess your results and then make needed changes. Your lens must follow the subject just before shooting and sometime after to be sure you are following the subject s movements. Guillaume Legraverend I am 36 years old and work as a software engineer for a big energy company in France. I had practiced photography for 6 years when I bought my Canon EOS 5D. I learned photography by reading forums and showing my shots, but the best way to learn photography with artistic vision is to go to the 1X.com site! I spent a lot of time studying photos posted on this site, which gave me ideas. I was greatly encouraged when my photos were published there. My website is www. guillaumelegraverend.com. In Lightroom, I removed some dust, increased the Contrast (+45), Clarity (+44), enabled Lens correction, and cropped the picture to tighten the composition. No work on noise reduction was needed here because I used ISO 100. Therefore not a lot of postprocessing work was required (no Photoshop). The main work was done during capture. ACTION 17

3 20 Nikon D300 Nikkor 28mm 1/400 sec. ISO 200

4 Air Tractor 802 Fire Boss in Action I had the idea to show the phases of an aircraft fighting a fire in the Cilento and Vallo di Diano National Park in the Province of Salerno (Campania), Italy. I set up my camera a safe distance from the fire, in an area where I could follow the fire fighting planes. This picture is composed of five images taken in sequence. I took a series of four shots of the plane as it made its pass and then took one more shot when the smoke was more intense. This shot did not have the plane in it, but I knew it would make a good background for the other four. I used spot metering and continuous autofocus. With this picture, I wanted to show the hard and important work the pilots of fire fighting aircraft do in tackling the large fires that often burn in the National Park in Southern Italy. To make the image stronger, I created a composite from five dramatic photos and created the sequence of passage of the plane while dropping the water. Hints Find a place without obstacles where you can observe the passage of the plane, always keeping a safe distance from the fire! Use the autofocus in continuous mode, but be ready to switch to manual because the smoke could fool the autofocus. Shoot in RAW mode to have a greater chance of recovery in post-processing, and shoot in continuous (drive or burst) mode to capture many images. Antonio Grambone I am 46 years old and live in Rome, Italy. My website is I loaded the five best images into Photoshop CS5. I copied the four photos of the planes onto the background image, the one with the extreme amount of smoke, to obtain a single image with five layers. To get the four images of the plane in the correct place, I adjusted the Opacity of each layer (upper picture). I could then align, rotate, and size the images so they looked like multiple exposures of a single plane passing over the fire (middle picture). I then reset the Opacity to 100%, created Layer Masks for layers 2, 3, and 4, and isolated the plane in these layers. I duplicated the background layer, placed it on top, and applied a Layer Mask. With the brush set at an Opacity of 25% and a Flow of 65% (bottom image), I filled the empty spaces of the underlying layers. I then grouped all visible layers into one layer and applied the plug-in Color Efex Pro 3.0 with the following values: (Filter = Bi-Color - Color 1 September - 68% Opacity - 100% Blend - vertical Shift 74% Rotation). ACTION 21

5 Nikon D300 Nikkor f/3.5 62mm f/5.6 1/250 sec. ISO EV 28

6 And Nothing Else Matters This picture was taken close to the Sacré Coeur, which is located on top of a hill of Paris. The idea of the shot came from a discussion about this famous Paris landmark. I went there especially to capture it. When I arrived, I started looking for the best angle, when suddenly this couple walked in right in front of me. I was annoyed because they were ruining my idea. The couple stopped and began a conversation, and I thought, Ouch, it will take me some time to achieve what I wanted! They sat down, and I became increasingly nervous. After a few minutes, the guy picked up a soda bottle. And then suddenly the picture appeared to me, and all bad feelings were replaced by joy. This image is not a composite in the way you might think. The grass, the building, and the people were really there in that exact position. Only the sky has been changed, which I will explain later. OK, you might wonder, obviously Paris is not sinking so what is the trick here? As I mentioned, the Sacré Coeur is on a hill, and there is a grass lawn there. To avoid perspective issues, I shot from a vantage point that appeared to put the couple on the edge of the lawn. Then I just tilted the camera so the lawn appeared horizontal and the building looked like it was sinking. That day there was a blue sky with clouds. Once I tilted the camera, the clouds also appeared to be tilted, which ruined the optical illusion. I decided to change it in post-processing, where I masked the sky and added the masked area as a layer over a second image showing the two people, the grass, and the building. I tilted the cloud formation until it looked natural (level). Hints Tilting the camera can give an interesting result! Try to look at things in a different manner. Be patient and wait for the good timing, which may or may not happen. Frank Ballet I m an amateur photographer and bought my first camera around I later rediscovered photography with digital. Reading and looking at images on the Internet is a big source of inspiration to me, and also provides a great school where a lot can be learned. I shot the two pictures (the subject plus the sky) in RAW and then converted them to TIFFs with the HDR software Oloneo, which allows for correction of the light. The idea of using HDR software is to boost the contrast and level of details a little bit. Once I had the two files, I loaded them into Photoshop, where I removed the sky with masks and layers. For this I used a tablet (much more convenient than a mouse), a black and a white brush, and a bit of time. Once that was done, I made the usual adjustments (Contrast, Saturation, Levels, Curves, etc.) and that was it. ARCHITECTURE 29

7 50 Sony Alpha mm lens f/1.4

8 Dreams I had met this wonderful little girl and took photos of her from time to time. I discovered that her personality was deeper and more romantic than I expected, but most people probably did not notice this. So I had the idea to shoot a heroine, telling something about her mysterious thoughtfulness and fragile, tender nature. I started to prepare for this work by spending lots of time with this little girl and at the same time trying to imagine how the composition of the shot should be made. It was easy to find the place for shooting, because the light coming through the windows of a new house seemed ideal. The time for the shooting was set for the afternoon. It was important for me that the timing of the ideal light for my work would coincide with the ideal mood of my 4-year-old model. I had to get close to my heroine in order to come in touch with the inner world of her dreams. So I was chatting with her to put her into a relaxed state of mind. At one moment, I noticed that my model was tired and was sitting silently, looking somewhere while I was shooting. She did not move, and this turned to be the culmination of the whole session. Later, looking through the shots, I selected this picture and continued working with it. It was very special and differed from the rest of the series. On the whole, over 100 shots were made, which is common for me when shooting children. I sought input from people by showing them this picture and asking, What is she thinking about? What is her sorrow about? I then worked with the color, trying to emphasize the feeling of solitude with cooling nuances. Hints Communicate with your subjects. Don t be afraid to divert from your plans. Pay attention to what is happening at the moment and go along with it. Elena Gromova Photography is my way to show my feelings, my inner world. It is an endless source of energy for me and helps me to express things that I cannot say with words. I started to take photos just a year ago and now it is an inseparable part of my life. My images can be seen at 1x.com/artist/fotomaker. For post-processing, I used Adobe Photoshop CS4. This helped me to make my picture lighter and more softly colored. After converting the image from RAW to JPEG, I corrected the yellow and red colors with Selective color to reduce the yellow tones in the picture and make it pinker. I cannot remember the exact settings of the corrections, which I prefer to make intuitively. Then I used curves to lighten the shot a little, and lowered extreme points of the curve to lessen the contrast. I then used color balance to add coolness and serenity to the image. Finally, I used texture in soft light overlapping and reduced the saturation. CHILDREN 51