Tips & Training

Archive

February 27, 2020 by PhotoKen

4 Great Reasons for Flower Photography

In this Quick Video I talk about 4 Great Reasons for Flower Photography. If you want to create Beautiful images that your family and friends will love then Flower Photography can help.

If you watch the Video you will see that Flower Photography can lead to a wonderful range of amazing images and is a conduit or doorway to getting Professional Looking Photos. You will get a bunch of concepts in this Video including a nice Overview of my Key Tool for explaining Essential Photography concepts – The Photo Triangle™ – as well as a strategies for getting great Flower photos.

Just like a gift of flowers, sharing a wonderful flower photo with your loved ones is sure to bring a smile to their face and brighten their day.

The 4 Great Reasons I see for diving into Flower Photography are:

Pleasing to the Eye – Plain and simple, flowers are beautiful and give feelings of hope, love, vibrancy, life, the joy of spring and so much more. The range and contrast of colors in flowers lead to wonderful shots.
Very Accessible – Want a beautiful subject without shelling out hundreds hiring a model? Flowers are very easy to obtain, whether it’s stepping outside your door or buying an inexpensive bouquet at your local store. Regardless of the season flowers are not difficult to come by.
Learn and Practice the Essentials – Flower photography allows you to easily learn and practice the essentials to great photos in general. From Exposure basics to Light Quality – to Composition – to Focus and more advanced Depth of Field – all these can be mastered with Flower Photography.
Explore Advanced Techniques – In addition to Key Concepts needed for Pro level photos you can also try out more Advanced Photography Methods such as Macro Photography (including Focus Stacking), HDR (High Dynamic Range) imaging and Advanced Composition styles.

Bottom Line is Flower Photography can take you from Basics, the Essentials, to more Creative and Professional Photos. If you have not tried Flower Photography I highly recommend giving it a go!

If you want to Create Amazing Flower Photography I highly recommend Photzy’s Photographing Fabulous Flowers written by Leanne Cleaveley – Leanne is a fantastic teacher and gives you the A to Z of Flower Photography – click on the Link below to get the Discount I arranged for you…

GET PHOTOGRAPHING FABULOUS FLOWERS >

If you are interested, or just a little Curious, click the Link Above – that page has much more details of what is covered in Photzy’s Premium Guide.

If you do want the Photography Essentials I was talking about in the video including the occasional Flower shoot you may be interested in my DPinsiders Program…

IF you are NOT on the Waiting List for the Next Enrollment in DPinsiders CLICK HERE TO GET ON THE LIST

Archive

November 24, 2015 by PhotoKen

Bringing in the Horses – fairly High ISO

Sunset Photo – “Bringing in the horses” – Canon 5D Mark III at ISO 6400

Sometimes you just need to use a higher ISO (in this case ISO 6400) to get the Shutter Speed you want…

Shutter Speed was set at 1/160 sec as I wanted the horses to be fairly sharply focused (and not motion blurred).

I did need to get fairly aggressive with the noise reduction in Adobe Lightroom (Luminance 52 and Color 36) – it results in a little softness – bordering on ‘painterly’ when zoomed in. I chose to have a little softness through noise reduction rather than a LOT of motion blur that would have resulted from a slower shutter speed.

Usually, I would keep ISO around 1600 or lower if I want really low noise on my images but that’s not always possible if light is low and subjects are moving.

When it comes to ‘ideal settings’ Photography is often a trade off in quality. What will result in the best possible image?

It’s also about removing the biggest obstacles in your photography. In most cases people can improve their images dramatically be removing the biggest photography hurdle first – the thing is – the number one hurdle is different for different people – Click here to find out Your # Photography Hurdle

Archive

May 10, 2015 by PhotoKen

Happy Mother’s Day and a Chance Capture…

Merganser bird photo

Happy Mother’s Day! – this photo is dedicated to all those mother’s out there who seem to be able to ‘run on water’ with their amazing ability to manage the kids, the household, careers and hobbies all with a smile 🙂

I took this photo the other day at the creek near my house.

Totally unplanned…

I had just taken some creek photos and was relaxing looking over the water when I saw this colorful bird cruising on the surface at the corner of my eye.

I slowly reached for my camera so as not to startle the bird (fortunately I had my 70-200mm f/28L lens on my Canon 5D Mark III at the time).

By the time I had my right hand on the camera, ready to pick it up, I saw our dog Bali (the Australian Shepard / Border Collie mix) charging towards the creek in the left corner of my view…

She had spotted the Common Merganser on the water – leaving me all of 1 or 2 seconds to get the camera to my eye and snap off a few shots.

I managed to get 4 shots as the bird took flight from the water. The one above was the best.

The ISO was really low – set at 100. Typically for action photography I would choose an ISO of 400-1600 to get a faster Shutter Speed.

As it turns out my camera was set to Aperture priority (which I recommend leaving your camera on) and set to Aperture f/3.5 and the Meganser was in the sun so I had a Shutter Speed of 1/320 sec. This gave me a reasonably fast shutter speed but you can still notice some movement blur as I was zoomed in at 200mm.

Panning with the bird, as it ran on the water, did help keep it in fairly good focus. But you will notice some blurring which I find gives a better feeling of motion.

This is the track and pan method I describe in my “Shutter Speed” video of the DSLR Basics Module in my EasyDSLR Digital Photography Course (Blue Membership).

If you want to learn this method…

OR are just a little curious about what else is in the course then head over to my >Special for Blue Membership here< This Special is for limited time – click the link to see how much time is remaining.

Archive

April 4, 2015 by PhotoKen

Explosive Color: Skagit Valley Tulip Festival

Took a little family trip through the Skagit Valley North of Seattle last week.

Just happened to be during the Tulip Festival 🙂

It’s an amazing explosion of color – really hard not to get some great photos. These are a few of my favorites. I won’t show you the other 235!

I was trying out some different perspectives using a Canon 5D Mark III paired with a 70-200 mm f/2.8 L lens and a 16-35mm f/2.8L lens. The first 3 were at 70 to 80mm. The 4th and 5th photo were at 200mm – I was using this focal length to ‘compress’ the perspective giving condensed bands of color. The last photo was at 16mm just holding the camera at arms length above a bed of tulips for a unique perspective.

I used different Focal Lengths and Apertures in these photos to modify the Depth of Field (how much is in focus) to give a different look to the photos. >>Click here to find out How to Isolate your Subject with Narrow Depth of Field <<

I hope this gives you some interesting angles to try out in your flower photography.