Luray Caverns

I decided to take my new Nikon 24-120 f/4 VR lens for a real test run today. So I put it on my Nikon D3S and headed out. I was hoping to get up to Skyline Drive and the Shenandoah National Park, but it was closed due to some snow and ice along the drive the sign said at the entrance station. So I decided to head somewhere I have been meaning to get to for a few years, Luray Caverns. It has been close to 21 years since my last time there and I have passed it numerous times on my drives out to Skyline Drive and Shenandoah National Park. 

I decided that Luray Caverns would actually provide a better testing ground for this lens than shooting outdoors, so happily off I went. Once I got to Luray Caverns I paid my $24 entrance fee and was soon headed down the staircase on one of the group tours. The tour is a guided tour of the largest caverns on the east coast. Luray Caverns covers roughly 64 acres and the tour walk is about a mile which takes around 1 hour. The tour guide reminded me not to lag behind as the lights will automatically go off shortly after the group leaves a certain area. I can attest to this fact as I got caught once lagging and all but a few walkway lights remained on. I was sure to keep up after that. 

I had brought along my Benro Travel Angel tripod hoping to shoot a few bracketed series for a few HDR’s. But once I realized that the guided tour was going to be at a relatively quick pace tour, like me trying to keep up with my family at Disney *LOL*, I just kept it folded up and bumped up my ISO to 2000 and handheld all of my shots. I believe a monopod would be a great alternative to a tripod here. 

Once I took a shot or two, I quickly realized that I would need to set me camera to manual versus aperture priority that I usually like to use and that I would need to use spot metering due to the wicked lighting that is there to get accurate readings. They use spotlights ALL over the place and due to the spaciousness of the caverns and placement of the lights you will get varying light so it was very important for me to be totally conscious of the highlights in each scene and meter them correctly. Also if I had shot on ‘matrix’ metering instead of spot I would have lost the nice rich blacks and shadows which gives an image depth due to the meter trying to average out all of the scenes.

 As the tour progressed the 24-120 on my D3S felt very comfortable and didn’t weigh me down, and I was glad I had that zoom range in one lens due to the over 50% humidity that is present in the caverns. I would have hated to have had to change lenses constantly in those conditions.  It was also refreshing to only have a fanny pack on with an extra battery, memory cards, and lens cloth.  I was so enjoying traveling light without a real camera bag of extra lenses. It also made it nice to be able to walk through the people on the tour too and not be worried about feeling like I may hit them with a heavy camera bag.

 As I had said, I bumped my ISO up to 2000 and was handholding all of the shots, so this was a great test for the VR capabilities of this lens. Well I am happy to report that it came through with flying colors. And speaking of colors, this lens renders some amazing color clarity. That must be due to the Nano coating on the lens. The colors are rich and accurate and the images also have a wonderful contrast to them too. But the biggest challenge was going to be the lens sharpness. That too is amazing. While it shows a little softness in the corners, I can easily live with that. Even though this lens is only an f/4 at its widest, shooting with it on a full frame camera with iso capabilities like my D700 and D3S offer more than make up for the lens speed.

 So to sum it up, I really am enjoying this lens for a nice walk around lens and one that I won’t hesitate to use in most shooting situations. It will pair nicely alongside my 16-35 and 70-200. And if you are ever in the Shenandoah Valley area I would encourage you to visit Luray Caverns too. It really is a sight to behold.

Expose for the highlights

Expose for the highlights and process for the shadows. This is what the Zone system taught us ‘old’ film photographers, well it is still true in the digital age. 

I have no problem sharing my exif info on my images, it offers a starting place for certain situations, but it doesn’t teach why those settings were chosen. This shot for instance, 1/250 sec @ f/2.8 with an iso of 1000. Yes you could set your camera to these setting and when you shot it you would expect a similar result…you would be disappointed. You would get a totally DIFFERENT result on your monitor than this because I shot for the highlights and processed for the shadows. So on your monitor with these settings this image would look very dark in the shadows, but Buzz’s face would look nice.

 Why did I do this? Because in some tough lighting situations such as this, if I just got an ‘average’ overall exposure the face of Buzz would end up totally blown out. Yes, the rest of the image would look nice, but you would have zero detail in the face to be able to anything with it. So I chose to expose for the highlight area which is Buzz’s face so I could keep the details in that area knowing that I could easily open up the darker areas and make a nice image.

 So understanding exposure and the basics of the zone system you can get a good starting exposure so you too can get wonderful images in tough lighting situations.

Benefits of Rim Light

With added rim light from the right.

Have you ever been discouraged when taking a picture with a flash because the subject, even though lit nicely, blends into the background? There is a way to seperate the subject from the background, and that is with Rim Lighting. Rim Lighting is a technique where you add extra light to the backside(s) of the subject which will add light along the ‘rim’ of the subject. By adding this extra light the subject is seperated from the background.

Read more about Rim Light.

Focus Stacking

This time of year I probably do more macro photography than any other time because I want to capture the fine details of the Christmas decorations and especially the Christmas tree ornaments. And while most times I love the shallow depth of field a good macro lens offers, sometimes it can interfere with the details of the ornaments themselves because of how big some of these ornaments are. Yes you could deepen the DOF by stomping down the f/stop, but that also takes away that wonderful Bokeh that separates the subject from the background.

 

Adobe CS5 offers a wonderful tool to help solve this problem and it is called FOCUS STACKING. By shooting several images of the same scene with different focal points you can combine them into one image where the subject will be in focus and you can keep the background out of focus.

Please read more about how to Focus Stack.

Shooting with flash

My son and I were heading to dinner this night when we saw they had lit the Christmas tree on the mall, so I asked him to pose in front of it so that I could get a picture of him. He of course went right up to it and started to make goofy faces, ha! This was okay while I got myself into place and set the camera to capture this.

Knowing that I was going to use a flash and that I wanted the lights from the Christmas tree to be exposed properly, as well as allowing for some of the background to be seen I knew I would be shooting in manual mode. So while my son was goofing I got a quick meter reading. I could tell that I would need to bump up my ISO to allow for a fast enough shutter speed to hand hold this shot, so I set it at 1000. This was going to be my baseline to dial in my settings.

After setting the camera to iso 1000 I decided to open the f/stop to f/4.5. This would allow me a little wiggle room with my aperture setting if needed. Then I pointed the camera at the scene and adjusted the only setting that I had left which was my shutter speed. Now here is where my cameras meter was telling me one thing due to the lights being bright, but my knowledge and experience kicked in. My meter was telling me 1/80 of a second was the “correct exposure”. So I took a quick test shot and just as I expected, the lights on the tree were the only thing visible. So I opened up the shutter speed and dialed it down to 1/13 of a second and shot another test shot- Perfect! The Christmas tree and background were in nice exposure. I was not worried about my son as he was very dark, actually almost a silhouette. But I was about to fix that.

Next I popped up my flash and asked my son to make another silly face for the camera and fired off a shot. Whoa! WAY too much light was on him, he was extremely over exposed. Because he was so close to me, about 3 feet, I knew that I would need to lower the flash output. So I pushed the FLASH COMPENSATION button and moved it down to a -1.0 output. I then took another quick shot and he was now slightly dark, so I opened up the f/stop all the way to 3.7 (my lens was a variable aperture lens) and took one more shot. Perfect. Now that I had the camera now dialed in it was time to try to get a good smile out of him. Good Luck on my part. Why do 5 year olds decide that a smile is gritting their teeth? HA!

As you can see, it really is pretty easy once you have an understanding of how to shoot in manual and how to read your cameras meter. Remember, you control the camera to create your visions, don’t let the camera control you. For a more in depth understanding on flash photography please read How To Shoot With Flash. Thanks.

This was shot with my Nikon D700 and the camera’s pop up flash. So like I said, you can do this too!

Shooting With Flash Or Added Light

One of the biggest mysteries of photography is when it comes to adding light when you take a picture, whether that light is from a flash, a strobe, or even a lamp. I am going to take the mystery out of it for you here and I will explain it in a simple enough way to make it really easy to understand.

Most people when they need to use a flash for any reason keep the camera in auto mode. And while you are most likely going to get an image that is evenly lit, it most likely will just look like another snapshot for the scrapbook. Wouldn’t you like to take a picture using a flash and make it look like you imagined it would and not another snapshot? And while some cameras have wonderful settings for fill flash and such, they don’t always get it right. And you want it right.

Read More on Shooting with Flash