Beyond Phototips

This is an article written by a good friend, about what he’s learnt about flash photography and babies. Do read on…

This sort of question always comes up with anything that is new, that we are not used to. For e.g. would you stop using mobile phone as some claim that it could cook your brain (we all use micro-waves to warm foods)? Some even warn that micro-waving food is also damaging to your health. I have no idea, and I am cautious. As I believe research done that proves wrong are usually funded by a company that has commercial interest in selling micro-wave devices.

Anyway, I am sometimes inundated in my email with the pictures that new parents take. Either they are too excited with their newly purchased digital camera or their new comer. Of course, we all would like to have pictures - loads of them; especially, of when we were babies, when we looked beautiful.

But how much is too much? No one seems to know that either. All I know is a little bit of photography and I think that the following Do’s and Don’ts could help mitigate the effect of the intimidating SLRs on the babies.

Do’s

• Avoid using Flash. Make sure you have proper light coming in while taking pictures. Goes without the saying that the good time to take the picture is the day time.
• Use big apertures (i.e. smaller numbers) to let enough light in.
• Use faster ISO such as 400, but it would bring in more noise. You can get less noisy pictures by using slow ISO such as 100, but best taken when you have a tripod.
• Use longer exposure (this is the shutter speed) while indoors. Longer the better but too long not good. Again using a tripod is advised.

Don’ts

• Do not use flash in a dark room and while she is awake. I do not know whether it is harmful to the eye, but I feel irritated and I am sure the babies do too.

Nobody seems to be conclusive on how bad the Flash is on the fragile eyes, in any case I would avoid it; after all his/her well being is important.

At last, the easy way to do is, you can tell the camera to turn off the flash, buy yourself a tripod and a zoom lens. This will be less intimidating to the child and you will be guaranteed to get stunning pictures which will tell the story for life.

But one thing that I always have problem with, I do not know how to command the baby to stay still, do you know how?

Happy taking pictures.

I’m amazed at Susheel’s ability to take pictures using his amazing camera, lenses and filters and his ability to edit his pictures in RAW format. He is a thorough professional but me – I’m an amateur with some decent knowledge about compositions. I use a small point and shoot Sony digital camera and I have loads of limitations in what I can do with it. What I usually do is to shoot pictures using unconventional angles, white balances and aperture settings, edit them in Photoshop and make them better looking. Let me tell you that I’m also not a pro in Photoshop. But I know some simple tricks using which I can give different effects to the photo I have taken. I use all of them and decide on an effect which gives the picture the maximum impact.

This is a picture of my cousin Niki I shot some time back using my point and shoot camera when he was on the beach (The first pic in the series). The photo got over exposed but I liked the camera angle and also the overexposed sky which is giving a white bg to my subject. I decided to work on this picture in photoshop to give it some effect and make it look better.

I opened the file in photoshop and as the first step I adjusted the levels using Image > Adjustments > Auto Levels on the menu bar. Then I corrected the picture a little more by adjusting the levels manually using Image > Adjustments > Levels. Moved around the sliders till I got satisfied with the subject’s look (Second Pic).

To give the subject a stylish look I duplicated the layer on which the picture was there and changed the layer type to hard light for the duplicated layer which is on top and played around with the opacity a bit. It looked better now (Third Pic).

If anyone remembers the posters of the movie Kal Ho Na Ho there was a strange black and white yet color effect which had been given to the photographs. I decided to try that effect on this pic by selecting the layer below and simply doing Image > Adjustments > Desaturate. Ah I got another effect now (Fourth Pic).

I wanted to try out another effect too to compare all three versions so I reverted back to the version just before me desaturating the layer. I was not sure what effect to try then I remembered Susheel’s soft focus trick using filters. I wanted to get that effect on this picture so I selected the layer below and did Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Keep the radius of the Gaussian blur a moderate 2.5 pixels. I had to also change the opacity of the top layer to 100% and I got this effect (Fifth Pic).

I have no idea if the effects I explained here were good enough for your pics or made any sense to most of you but believe me every time you try a variation of the settings I explained you get a new effect for your pic. How you make use of them is the key. Just try it out and let me know if you got a brand new effect. Please note that these tiny tricks are for amateurs like me, the professionals will have a better idea on how to do photo correcting in their own better ways.

Umesh is a User Experience Designer who is interested in photography. Check out his blog White Space.

I’ve often heard people look at a photograph exclaim, “Oh, that’s photoshop!” when what they really meant was “Oh, that’s retouched!” making the name “Photoshop” synonymous with “digital retouching”. Now, Photoshop is by no means easy to learn and the newbie can be quite intimidated by it, so having someone teach you how to use it is a great help.

Photowalkthrough.com is a great way to learn how all this retouching is done. Hosted by John Arnold, Photowalkthrough is a video Podcast that shows you how you can process your digital images in Photoshop and other programs. John explains how to use photoshop’s tools and explains various techniques in an un-hurried, in-depth fashion. Each photograph is typically worked on over the course of 3-4 shows and you can watch as each decision that John takes leads to the final processed image. I vote a big thumbs up for this podcast!

If you ‘re interested in subscribing, head on over to www.photowalkthrough.com or go to the iTunes store and search for the podcast through iTunes.