The lighting setup was rather simple, two side lights for rim, and an awesome beauty dish up front. Darrel, and myself will be holding workshops soon to show you how we got these pinup results, and www.lensrental.co.za will be sponsoring some cool kit for us to use.

There is a fair amount of processing involved, but nothing you could not learn in about 30 minutes. My idea behind the final result was to get this beautiful skin which glows, and the background to be “pure” clean looking, Oh and yes, the tattoo’s are not real

Keep an eye out, we will announce some workshops soon.

In between the pages is a very thin piece of plastic which helps glue the pages together. This makes the pages thick and they look awesome with a two tone look. I can make small (6′x8′) Medium (8′x12′) and large (11′x16′) books. I have made two so far in the last two days since getting the system and cannot wait to make more.

• Evaluative metering: The camera analyzes the entire frame and then selects exposure settings designed to produce a balanced exposure.
• Partial metering: The camera bases exposure only on the light that falls in the center 9 or so percent of the frame.
• Spot metering: This mode works like Partial metering but uses a smaller region of the frame to calculate exposure. For Spot metering, exposure is based on just the center 4 percent of the frame.
• Center-Weighted Average metering: The camera bases exposure on the entire frame but puts extra emphasis, or weight, on the center.

I personally use partial metering 90% of the time. I just find it gives me a nice consistent exposure for my taste. On the odd occasion I use spot metering where the scene is very contrasty, such as when there is a lot of bright and dark area’s. Spot metering is also very useful when your subject has backlighting and you need to get a great exposure of the subject.

The image above was taken at a mine dump, with the sun behind my model, and I wanted to get a blown out background, some rim light on her body and hair. Here I used spot metering to meter for the model, to make sure the background was very light and the exposure on my model was good to slightly over exposed.

Without understudying how inter related those settings are, so that you can get a great exposure, you will be lost. It will not help you to just know about them, you need to know how they effect each other when taking a photograph. You will also need to understand exposure metering, but I will write about that soon.

When we discuss flash photography, I am not just talking about a 580ex or SB900 flash, but portable studio lighting as well. They are all the same difference really. They have a flash tube and emit a “flash” of light. So the principles we will chat about here are for any “flash” device, even your on camera flash.

So basically, what we want to do, is create a cool exposure using a flash with ambient (continuos) lighting, and the 2 most important settings we will adjust are the aperture and shutter.

1. The shutter exposes for ambient light.
2. The aperture exposes for the flash light.
3. We will get to the ISO.

Now depending on how you combine these two settings, you can create a huge variety of different looking exposures, from darkening the ambient light, to over exposing the ambient light. What this does, is help us really create an image where our subject stands out more than normal. It is also a cool way to add light to our subject which might otherwise be darker than its surroundings.

Since ISO is actually how sensitive the sensor is to light, you might want to adjust the ISO to help get a better exposure for ambient lighting if the ambient light is very low. It will help you get a better exposure, but it can also help you expose the main subject correctly should you have a smaller flash. If the flash is not that powerful or heavily diffused  you might want to adjust the ISO since it does effect the aperture exposure. Essentially that is the biggest part the ISO will play with flash photography.

• Smaller the number = Less sensitive to light. Generally for bright scenes (e.g. ISO50)
• Larger the number = More sensitive to light, generally for darker scenes (e.g. ISO3200)

Lets say you wanted to shoot some karate indoors with low levels of light. In order to freeze the action and get a higher shutter speed, you need to “up” the ISO to a larger number to freeze the action. It will give you the ability to get a higher shutter speed. There is however a down side to this, and that is more “noise” on your final image with a higher ISO setting. With all the new camera’s today (5DMKIII just released) the ISO performance has become very impressive at the higher numbers, so it is not as much of an issue as it used to be.

ISO 100 is considered “normal”, which produces beautiful, detailed and crispy results.

A fairly recent development in digital photography is the Auto ISO feature, where the camera will determine the ISO for you, and maintain a reasonable shutter speed.

Choose your ISO setting based on:

• the amount of light on the main subject.
• how much grain (noise) is acceptable.
• if you are using a tripod or not.
• whether your subject is moving or not.

• Smaller F-stop number = larger opening, and more light let in (e.g. F2.8)
• Larger the F-stop number = smaller the opening, and less light is let in (e.g. F22)

 Aperture and Depth Of Field.

Depth of field is generally referred to as the part of an image that is in focus. The aperture effects the “in focus” area, by either  having more of the photo in focus or less of the photo in focus.

Aperture influences the widening or narrowing of the in focus area, therefore bringing more or less of the photo in focus, depending on the distance the objects are from the camera.

• Small F-stop number = Shallower the depth of field (less is in focus e.g. F2.8)
• Larger the F-stop number = Great the depth of field (more will be in focus e.g. F22)

Some activities you can try at home:

• Find some interesting objects at home which are at different distances. Shoot the main subject at different F-stops and see the effect it has on the background.
• Also take note as to what happens to the shutter speed when adjusting the f-stop. (VERY IMPORTANT)

The above images was taken in St Lucia with an awesome 600mm lens, and at F4.  Look at the depth of field here, awesome huh ? but remember the background was a good distance away as well. I also had to bump the ISO rather high to get the shot as the sun had just popped up over the horizon.

So how does this effect my photography ?

Your shutter actually captures a duration in time equal to the shutter speed,  not a instance of time. This makes more sense when you look at long exposures or slower shutter speeds.  If, what you are photographing is in motion while your camera’s shutter is open, it will appeared blurred in your photograph. If your shutter speed is very slow, and you accidentally move your camera around while taking a photograph, your end result will have smearing effect in the direction the camera moved, or more commonly known as camera shake. This  can however be done on purpose to give a artistic result .

• Always use a high shutter speed to freeze motion or action
• To create the effect of motion in your image, use a slower shutter speed and move the camera in the same direction your subject is moving. This takes practice and is tricky.
• User a slower shutter speed while your camera is on a tripod and photograph a waterfall. This will make the water smooth and silky looking.
• Use a very slow shutter speed at night while you camera is on a tripod, and you will capture very faint light from stars and even create star trails.

Some activities you can try at home:

1. Photograph a waterfall with different shutter speeds and see the effect on the moving water. Start at 500th or a second and try go to about 2 seconds shutter speed. You might need to do this late in the afternoon, or when the light is rather dim.
2. Put your camera on a tripod and shoot a busy street. Do this just after the sun sets. See the effect the slower shutter speeds make. Again start at a very high shutter speed and go down to about  3-4 seconds.
3. Photograph some cyclists and move the camera in the same direction they are going, trying to achieve the slowest shutter speed, while still keeping the cyclist sharply in focus. You should notice a nice motion blur on the background.

You might not need to manually configure all these settings all the time, but they still ALWAYS work together. These settings cannot be switched off on a camera, but they can be automated.

The three settings are:

• ISO = how sensitive the image sensor is to the amount of light present. (i.e. ISO 50 is less sensitive than ISO 200)
• Aperture =  referred to the lens diaphragm opening inside a photographic lens. (Size of the opening in the lens)
• Shutter = Shutter speed is a setting on your camera which controls the length of    time the shutter is open.

I personally believe, one really needs to master these three settings, and how they work together. It does not matter if you are taking a photograph of a leopard in the tree, or a fashion model in studio, you need all three of these settings, and depending on how these setting are configured by you, this will determine how your photograph looks. They unfortunately are just that important.

I will be putting up more in depth explanations about these settings.