Worked a retirement party last month, and I just posted some of the pictures on the photography site. The party was hosted at Bella Italia in Orange, NJ in honor of two of our favorite teachers retiring.

It was a great, Sunday afternoon event, and everyone had a great time. Click through to the post to see some more pictures from the day.

Why use shutter priority mode when your outside with your speedlight…? Cause otherwise you’ll end up with a picture like this. Oops.

I had two new students taking pictures at graduation. That tends to happen every year, because my photography crew is all seniors… so they can’t really take pictures when they’re in the graduation. I’m also participating in the graduation, so I can give the new girls some hints here and there but I can’t follow them around and make sure everything goes smoothly.

In this case, I instructed them to try and shoot from the left side of the field, where the sun would come down and light everyone nicely (see post 1 of this series). Then I made the mistake of telling them that if they really needed to take a picture from the right side of the field, they could try putting the speedlight on top and seeing if that helped.

Keep reading…

This past weekend, I worked a job for a Campus alumni – the 1st Annual Red Carpet Single Mothers Appreciation Day. Took a lot of great pictures, celebrated a lot of fabulous single mothers, handed out some business cards, and networked with some potential partners for our photography studio.

The event was organized by Akeem Cunningham, an ’08 graduated from Campus High.  He brought together a bunch of people from the E.O. / Newark area – the fire department, restaurants, motivational speakers, photographers, barbers, clowns – to help celebrate single mothers and give them and their children a fun-filled, easy going day. It turned out to be an awesome day, and you can the album from the event here – Single Mother’s Appreciation Day at Watsessing Park.

A problem with cranking up the ISO setting on your camera is that your pictures will come out noisy. But does that mean you should never turn up the ISO setting on your camera…?

Nope. The picture to the left, from my coverage of the 2011 William Paterson University fashion show, was shot at the maximum regular ISO setting for my Canon EOS Rebel t1i – ISO 3200. When you zoom in to a 1:1 ratio, you can see some noise. However, I edited the picture in Lightroom and I also scaled it down in resolution for web viewing.

At this point, even if you click on the picture to bring up a full screen image, you won’t notice a whole bunch of noise. If you ask me, it looks great. I doubt it would look all that much different if I had put up a flash and stepped the ISO down to a more reasonable 400 or so.

Why Does the Picture Look Nice…?

Here’s another picture, from the same show and the same set up.

To give you an idea… I was sitting in the audience about 10 rows back. I had a telephoto zoom lens on the camera (70-200mm f/2.8).

The model started out in the back of the stage, where there was usable but slight amounts of light, and they walked down the runway into a bright, hot spotlight.

On the back of the stage, they were coming out ok at something like f/2.8, 1/125, ISO 3200. At the front of the stage under the spotlight, the models were perfectly well lit at f/2.8, 1/320, ISO 3200.

The key to the picture, and the reason that the noise isn’t terribly bad, is that there is enough light to brightly light the subject and allow for a proper exposure.

How Bout a Picture That’s Not So Nice…

In this picture, from the same show, there is considerably more noise. You might also notice that the picture looks a bit fuzzy as well as noisy.

The problem is that in this scene, the lights were not sufficient to light the models. The lights were dimmed for the whole scene (friendly warning, the gallery isn’t 100% safe for work), and I was shooting at f/2.8, 1/100, and ISO 3200. That was quick enough to prevent there from being too much motion blur or camera shake, but it left the pictures underexposed by about a stop.

This creates a two-fold problem. When the camera takes an underexposed picture, noise tends to be worse. Then, when you edit the picture (which I did in Lightroom, bumping the exposure by +1 and the Fill Light by 25), that noise gets exacerbated.

Add to that the fact that I cropped the picture, and you notice a lot of noise. To combat the noise, I jacked the Noise Reduction in Lightroom up to 50… and that kind of helps, but it also makes the picture a little fuzzy. It’s all a matter of compromise. The alternative would be not having a picture at all. Without a high ISO rating and without some help from Lightroom, I simply wouldn’t have been able to get any kind of usable picture from this scene with the lights dimmed.

In short, pictures taken at a high ISO can still look great if the subject is well lit. If you’re camera handles noise well and you run the image through software like Lightroom or Photoshop, a well exposed image will still look good. An underexposed image is going to look noisy, but you might just have to put up with it if you alternative is to not have a picture at all.

Photo by: j.tree.

I was browsing through the recent uploads on Flickr, and I came across a picture from a Weezer concert (not this one). I followed through to it, looked through the photostream, and saw this pic. It really caught my eye. The lighting in the venue must have been good… the picture is crisp, the ISO wasn’t too high (i.e. there isn’t too much noise). It also catches a nice bit of action here. Shooting concerts can be a nightmare when you don’t know what the lighting is going to be like… and clearly it was crazy lighting (see all the blue around), but it was also bright enough to allow for some nice pictures.