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Flash Features

Light is the major source for photography. An adequate light can give more details to the subject. A subject and place (ambience, surrounding light) plays an important role for shooting a perfect photography. Three major criteria determine the brightness of picture such as shutter speed, aperture setting and flash modes you choose. Under this criteria flash modes plays an vital role and it varies with different kinds of digital camera.

Consumer oriented digital cameras has inbuilt flash that operates in different modes and they are considered to be the basic flash modes. In addition to these automatic modes flashes are presented in four different independent modes such as fill flash, no flash, red eye reduction and night time flash also known as slow synchronization flash.

Fill Flash

Fill Flash is mainly used for outdoor shoot. When a photograph of a person is taken under bright sunlight, a black shadow will appear around the subject face and those details will be immerged into dark. So the picture will not be clear and it projects a simple object with no details. If you switch to Fill Flash mode then this mode will flashes some additional light on the subject face and bring more tonal details of the face.

No Flash

As the name implies this mode uses no flash on the subject. In case of shooting flat and more reflective objects such as metals and glass that has no tonal details and has completely white on surface, then No Flash mode helps to avoid the unnecessary reflection by flashing no lights on the subject. When you select No Flash mode then the camera will reduces the shutter speed to compensate for dim lighting.

Red Eye Reduction

When you take a picture of a person using point and shoot film camera the flash will reflect on the subject eye and results in red glint on the eye. Red Eye Reduction mode will solve this problem by projecting low power flash before the real flash going to take place. So this low power flash light will tend to close the iris of the eye ball a little to avoid the reflection. Before taking a picture of a person let him know the sequence of flash that happens to avoid red eye so that the subject may not think that preflash is the real flash.

Slow Synchronization mode

Slow Synchronization mode is otherwise called as nighttime mode or nighttime flash mode. When you focus particularly on the subject then the background goes beyond the reach of the flash and become dark. Slow Synchronization mode takes more ambient light by increasing exposure time beyond the normal time resulting in lighter background on the subject. It also works along with the shutter speed. If the shutter speed is less then the image will be brighter. Normally camera uses higher shutter speed to allow flash light to be used as primary light rather than surrounding light. Slow Sync mode uses slow shutter speed to allow more ambient light to enter into camera so the background looks brighter than when you take picture using normal flash mode.

External Flash Unit

High end digital cameras have a provision for separate external flash unit that can be fixed on the horse shoe of the digital camera or by socket which connects camera and flash via cables. The external flash unit looks like larger flash head on many professional digital cameras. This larger flash head produce narrowly focused beam of light on the subject than a built-in flash. You can control the angle and the intensity of the light in external flash units. If your camera has no provision for external flash unit it does not mean that you cannot add additional flash unit for your shot. There are different kinds of external slave flash units available to work along with camera’s built in flash but they are not directly connected to the camera. External slave flash unit flashes its light automatically and illuminates the subject when camera’s built-in flash goes off.

Calling Your Shots at Night

You might have come across myriad photographs of the past, which defined night characters and those daytime photographs that came shrouded by a nocturnal impression. For a commoner, these specimen may not amount to anything worth pondering, but if you belong to that rare class of connoisseurs, you would not waste much time to identify them as the specimen of the much regarded night-photography. This practice can be dated back to some of the earliest celebrities of the sector. You simply got to praise them for their splendid efforts even with a crowd of odds around such as larger camera size, sluggish film speed or the huge wet plates in use in those days. In spite of all these technical limitations that prevailed then, these geniuses came up with blinders more often than not. Even today, with all the technical upper-hands shrouding the scene, almost every photographer who has seriously taken this art, should have tried a night shot at sometime or other, while a limited number of photographers have looked like devoted their skills exclusively to the enigma of night photography.

Some All Time Greats

If you dig deeper, you will certainly come to find that the early 1900s can be regarded as the golden age of night photography. This was the era when titans of this sphere like Brassai, Genthe, Stieglitz and Steichen, ruled the sector with their classic nocturnals. 1920s and 30s saw a good number of photographers aligning with the Surrealist Movement started working at night and what more, even a good number of their day photographs as well, bore nocturnal touch. One of those stalwarts was an Englishman called Bill Brandt, who too like the others loved the darkness of night more than anything else. He strived to reveal war-time as well as post-war industrial England. Then, if you have come across a famous (or notorious) photograph that depicted the burning of Hitler’s house, you obviously have savoured the artistry of a woman photographer known to the world as Lee Miller, who specialised in conceiving night images of the second world war. You should also be pondering over the legendry “Moonrise over Hernandez” realised by the great Ansel Adams that was explained with the sense of mystery brought about by a cryptic combination of a darkened sky, moonlight and above all the blanket of dusk.

Challenging

Photography at night hours, more often than not, proves to be challenging for even a consummate professional. At times even shooting with a digital SLR would tend to emulate the process with a film camera. The long waits for results that follow the setting of long exposures that ranges from 3 to 5 minutes, the high margin of error and the fast changing natural ambience calls for the precision-sense in you. That says, you should be precisely knowing the culmination of that reading with which, you intend to shoot and should always be capable to explain why not, with another combination. Moreover, holding the camera for long periods due to some long shutter speeds that hover around anything between 10 to 30 seconds is quite demanding as you can imagine. This is even more deteriorated with the hassle of blurring at the instance of the minutest camera shake.

Packing for an Event

To optimise your night photography results, apart from your medium format or 35mm camera with the options of manual controls and time setting (bulb), you would find these thing handy;

A notepad and writing devices for noting down exposure variations
A good tripod
Any Digital Timer
Any sort of small flashlight
Extra Batteries for the Camera
Locking Cable Release
Lens tissue to clean the lens in foggy conditions
A plastic bag to cover the ccamera in foggy conditions

Exploit the circumstances to the maximum

We earlier discussed the hassles of longer shutter speed or bulb shooting along with the inconvenience of holding the camera for longer periods due to the same reasons. The ideal solution here, is the engagement of a sturdy tripod, with which, you can set long exposures for your digital camera. You are at peace of mind too with no worries, such as camera shakes irking you. Implimenting an external shutter release device, can virtually eradicate the hazard of camera shakes, though, this can be effectuated only if your camera supports this device. We are obviously talking about the spoilsport called blurring. However, you cannot take blurring as undesired at every instance of photography, certainly not, if you are a thorough professional. For you know that at times blurring can be harnessed to merge harmoniously with creativity. For example, those blurrs resulted from speeding cars at night time on a motorway, which can be optimised if the motorway is next to a lit cityscape or skyscraper. Another fine tip here, is all about increasing the ISO speed of your digital camera, for higher the ISO speed, better the tolerance of quicker exposures. This is increasingly significant while shooting in the absence of a tripod. More precisely, you might find it extremely demanding to maintain your digital camera still for 1/15 th of a second or perhaps longer in order to keep blurring at bay by obtaining the ideal light for that scene. Here, a higher ISO setting would definitely relieve you by making the camera tolerate a 1/30 th of a second exposure or quicker. However, you must also be familiar to the fact that an increased ISO setting is always accompanied by an increased amount of noise.

When?

Even though a genuine night-photograph refers to something conceived an hour or so after sunset, the best advice for you would be to seek your target at or shortly after dusk. This is for, the ovverall light amounts to an explicit balance of natural as well as artificial light at this point of time, while the mood obviously refers to night. This can be significant if you look to nighttime cityscape photography. At dusk, the sky though appears dark would felicitate some amount of sunlight enter your camera. This makes it easy for you to capture handheld photographs with lesser fear of camera shake hazards. As the old proverb goes, ‘All good things have to end’, the dusk is also short lived, at least for a day. Considering this fact, you can locate you shooting sites beforehand. Checking in the weather websites for the sunset time would also do you a world of good.

White Balance for Colour Optimisation

White Balance, also known as Colour Correction basically refers to an application that prompts a digital camera to conceive white subjects at their whitish best and not as tints of various colours. This aspect can also be observed in the human-nature correlation, where human eyes and brain tend to ignore or fail to notice the variation between different colourations of light that occur in different places as well as times. For example, human beings know that a paper sheet is white and hence see it as white. This phenomenon can be called, ‘intuitive white balance of the nature. However, a digital camera being not as intuitive as a human being, lacks this reasoning capability and hence conceives the world as it is actually.

When observed carefully, one can find that early morning colours tend to be a bit on the bluish side on sunny days. Middays possess balanced colours as evening or late afternoon colours usually tends to be a bit reddish in nature. The fact behind these colour variations refers to the distance travelled by the sun rays through the atmosphere before hitting the earth’s crust. The longer distance the sun rays travel more scattering takes place. Until recent times where films ruled the photography sphere, film manufacturers designed different films fitting different light conditions such as outdoor, indoor, morning light, evening light, etc, in which a correction coluld not be performed unless a filter was posted in front of the lens of the camera. However, digital cameras emerged with the scope of a radical change in this field.

White balancing in a digital camera is explained primarily by the separating of the primary colours (red, green and blue) from the inbound sun rays. Consequently, the separated primary colours are changed into electrical signals by the digital camera’s imager and are processed separately. Further, these colours are matrixed together complying with certain fixed standards to obtain composite video signals. These signals are subjected to colour addition in the processing stage itself by the digital camera. The end results are explicit images of real colours.

A good lot of photographers tend to change the white balance of those images captured by them, at a later stage using the image-editor application available in most advanced digital cameras. This process however, cannot be considered ideal, for the camera itself processes the image prior to saving it as a JPEG compression file. In this process the camera applies the appropriate white balance too, to the image. When a second edition is performed by the photographer, a considerable quality loss is inflicted on the image. This refers to a couple of smart steps for the photographer to optimise the colour details of his/her images. The first one is obviously setting the appropriate white balance for the scene in the camera. The other step is the smart way of capturing images in RAW mode to edit it according to the photographer’s tastes later using the camera’s edit tool or a computer.

Another mistake that is made usually by a beginner, is setting the white balance of the camera in automatic mode trusting blindly the camera’s intuitions to adapt according to the available light. This can result in spoiling the images, for the camera would try to normalise the colours in the scene after subjecting them for analysis, which often comes a cropper for the lack of intuition in its part to differentiate between the intrinsic colours in the subject and the colour of the available light. Here, switching to the appropriate white balance presets would be a sensible act for they can render realistic colours that are warmer while more often than not, the auto mode fails in conceiving the perfect correction for shady conditions. A clever photographer exploits the white balance presets of the digital camera by virtually spoofing it. For example, the white balance presets is set to cloudy mode for capturing a colour-rich sunset. Here, the camera, being fooled by the photographer, renders high quantity of warmth to the image that in its turn exhibits its red details to the maximum consequently subduing its blue details.

Landscape Photography

Landscape art is another name by which landscape photography is known. Nothing less than genre painting, this photography style tends to bring forth the grandeur and dazzle of the nature at its best. The subjects here, ranges from waterfalls and seascapes to mountain vistas and other landforms. Smart landscape photographers make good use of the weather and the ambient light conditions to enhance their splendid art works. The legendary American landscape photographer, Ansel Adams According to the renowned British landscape photographer Charlie Waite, A prediction with total precision of light observed through its behaviour cannot be made for different regions of the world definitely have their own shares of ravishing light. Joe Cornish advocates the theory that though the landscape forms the subject, the light is what photographers record and interpret. He goes on to state that in landscape photography, the studio is the sky, where light discloses texture, explains space, sculpts form, regulates colours and also triggers an emotional response.

Ideal Time

The ideal time for landscape photography, according to the experts, generally are the hours in the vicinity of dawn. This time might render the photographs captured, a magical touch. The mist that shrouds the landscape is capable of adding a special dimension to the picture realised. Chance of camerashake is also nominal around that time due to the less windy conditions. Moreover, the photographer also gets a serene atmosphere to shoot his/her images in total tranquility for this is the time when there are not much people around. Dusk is also a good time to engage in landscape photography for, this time renders the best opportunity to manipulate on the red colour of the spectrum, while light is low and those colours supported by the dying sun are sharper due to the shady conditions. The photographers call this, the ‘warming up’ process. David Ward has rightly said that the most critical part of landscape photography is the knowledge of the precise matching of the subject and the available light.

Know the Device

Before starting to shoot make it a habit to check that the lenses and the digital camera sensor are spic and span. Because, the quality of the images get affected if the lenses are unclean and the dusty marks on the sensor will definitely show up on the pictures as well as smear some significant details. Most digital cameras, switched to ISO 100, performs at their best, yielding the lowest of noise. Camera shake is a major hassle experienced here, especially when hand-holding the device. Therefore, using a tripod is advisable here and if such a provision is found missing, the usage of higher ISO speeds is recommended than risking the camera-shake. Clicking a couple of shots for each scene, one at high ISO speed and the other, at low can be done for a smart comparison between the two images. Setting the appropriate shutter speed for a scene can aid in keeping the images sharp, especially when a tripod is not among the provisions. Roughly, a shutter speed par the focal length of the camera is considered ideal. For example, for a camera of 100mm focal length, set a shutter speed of 1/100th second. Multiple shooting of a scene, with different exposure levels also helps in choosing quality pictures by giving more chances to the camera for it can always be spoofed by the evasive light conditions. Finally, shooting in RAW mode instead of simply packing the pictures in JPEG compression files provides the option of editing the pictures without much quality loss.

Imagination

This is the essence of not just landscape photography, but all specialisations in the photography sector. A photographer must be sensitive enough to conceive the colour of light to judge between, to engage or not to engage the filter. A good photographer’s intuitions would inform him/her of the light source’s size, height and direction. The most significant advice given to an aspiring photographer by his teacher, however is, to wander more but capture only a few pictures, in-spite of sporting a digital camera that shoots at the rate of a machine gun at the expence of just rechargeable power.

Digital Camera basics - Part 3: Capturing images

Digital cameras use different methods to capture the image depending on the type of image sensors and colour filters. As the image sensors are only capable of recording the intensity of light (i.e. brightness or darkness), digital cameras use colour filters to produce a full colour image. Thus, digital cameras use the combination of sensors and filters in different ways to record the image.

Capturing the brightness of image
What happens, when the shutter opens (though in fractions of a second) and light enters through the aperture? The light falls on CCD sensor whose pixels (in fact they are light sensitive diodes) convert the light into electrically charged particles. Each pixel, depending upon the brightness of the light that falls on it, becomes charged with different magnitude.  Brighter the light highly electrically charged it becomes. In other words, pixels that record the brighter portion of the image are highly charged while the pixels that record the darker areas of the image will be less electrically charged.  Thus, the image is wholly converted into electrons of various magnitudes on a CCD sensor.

Capturing the colours of image
The image sensor in a digital camera records only the brightness of the image in a series of various intensities. To produce a wide range of colours, the digital camera uses filters when the sensor is exposed to the light (image). The principle behind the colours dates back to the late nineteenth century, when James Maxwell discovered that a full colour photograph can be formed by using three filters of primary colours – red, green and blue. To recreate the natural colour tones of the image, all one has to do is to capture the image using these colour filters in quick succession and put them together on a screen or a print. Digital camera uses the same principle to capture colours, however, it differs from a conventional camera by the way it captures the image.

Single exposure of image sensor to the subject
Some digital cameras use single-shot method, in other words, the sensor is exposed to the image only once. To produce colours, two mehods are used – one way is to use three individual sensors of red, green and red and another way is to use a single sensor with a Bayer filter which has all the primary colours (RGB).

The first method uses beam splitter which splits the light and makes it pass through image sensors of the primary colours (RGB). The Image captured using this method usually will have more vivid, very precise colours and some of the high-end cameras use this type of image capturing.  However, these cameras usually come in bulky models and with very high price tags.
 
The second method is better suited to compact digital cameras. This method uses a single sensor and a colour filter which is placed over it. This colour filter (mostly Bayer filter) helps to produce all natural colours that make up the image. The Bayer filter mosaic is a colour filter array (CFA) made up of red, blue, and green filters each sitting on every pixel or photosite of the sensor. CFA will usually have more green elements as half of the array is made up of it. Red and blue will constitute 25% each. According to this Bayer filtering method, each pixel will represent only one colour of the primary colours (i.e. RGB) and all the pixels need to be interpolated to produce the complete colour details of the image. For interpolation or deducing the complete colour information of each pixel and to produce the full image, a set of demosaicing algorithms are used by a digital camera. The raw data provided by the Bayer filters produce a jpeg or Tiff file depending on the type of demosaicing algorithm used.

Multiple exposures of image sensor to the subject
In some digital cameras, the sensor is exposed to the subject (image) three or more times in succession. Most multi-shot cameras use a single sensor with RGB filters which move over the sensor to get the colour values of each pixel so that the image with true colours can be captured. In another variation, a CCD sensor and a Bayer colour move on the plane where the image is focused to produce sharper picture quality. Apart from these two methods, some digital methods use a hybrid of the two methods, however, the Bayer filter is generally not used.

Scanning technique
This is another method used by digital cameras to capture the image. Here, the sensor scans over the plane where the image is focused. Most sensors used in this type of cameras are either linear or tri-linear which scan a single or three arrays each representing a colour of RGB. Some digital cameras use advanced scanning technique and the camera is rotated while scanning over the focal plane. These cameras usually much more picture details (resolution) than other cameras.

Kodak Linear CCD sensor

When comparing these different techniques of image capturing, multi-shot (multiple exposure of the sensor) and scanning methods offer much better quality in terms of resolution and colour information than a simple single shot technique. Hence, most high-end cameras used for professional use adopt multi-shot and scanning technique while a single shot technique produces decent image quality for amateur use. 

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