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Camera Considerations

So the cool thing about late painting is we really don't need any special gear. We don't need special lenses. We don't need special cameras, more special tripods. What you have is probably just fine, but what's important is that you know what you have and how to use it. So let's take a look at some basic camera considerations that I want you all to think about before you get started. We can do this out in the field. You could do it at home, but these air considerations that you should really think about now some of these are going to be things you should be thinking about on a regular basis. Anyway, uh, this is not, you know, specific or to the discipline of light painting like file format, for example, um, most professionals will shoot in raw. Of course, there's exceptions to that. But, um, we want to shoot in a raw file format so that we have lots of headroom to edit our images, picture styles. We're gonna want to explore that. If you've never heard of that before, this will be fairl...

y interesting to you. Um, LCD brightness. It's dark at night. And that bright monitor is gonna hurt our eyes. We'll talk about it. Also, we're gonna get into the hissed a gram. Um, and have you guys truly understand how this works? So you can make proper decisions out in the field? Um, and last will end up with a little cheater called overexposure. Warning. So let's take a peek at file format. Um, this is super important, you guys, uh, when it comes to post processing, you're gonna end up doing a fair amount with late pain. I mean, I guess that's not necessarily really depends on the person. I end up doing a fair amount of post processing. I think what that does it extends my shooting abilities out in the field. So I've got more possibilities of what I can do. So I'm always thinking about how I'm gonna post process when I'm outside late painting. So, for that matter, because I'm doing a lot of post processing. What I want to set my file format to is the raw setting. Now most cameras will have many different options. You can see here it's nef, which is raw. Plus J peg fine. J peg normal. All these options are are really irrelevant people. All we need to know is raw. So my suggestion to you is start off, put your camera and wrong, and you can really leave it there for the rest. Your photography. There's really no reason to go back my right picture styles. So what picture styles do is they allow you to change the flavor, if you will, of the file again. This is ah, the back of my Nikon camera. And you can see I've got standard neutral, vivid monochrome portrait and landscape and what I will do before I go out and shoot as I will actually set my picture style my picture control to neutral. Now, what this is going to do is it's gonna give me a really flat image. And of course, when we're photographing at night, we're dealing with ah, lot of high contrast scenes. We're gonna have ah, super bright highlights and maybe city lights really dark shadows. And putting it on neutral really tells me exactly what the camera is capturing. It gives me the best idea of what my file is is really going to look like if you're shooting in raw, what you're getting on the back of your LCD when you were reviewing your image is actually a J pig. It's a process jpeg. Now, of course, your raws not being processed. But the J peg is so if I shoot and I'm sitting said in camera raw now and I take a picture on, um, on camera standard, I'm gonna get an LCD preview that may be showing mawr contrast or more saturation than is actually in the raw file. If I put it on camera neutral, what I'll see on the back of the LCD is again more flat, less saturated, less contrast. So this LCD preview out in the field now at this moment is really influencing the decisions I'm gonna make. How much light should I paint on the scene? What's my ambient exposure? Perhaps even your white balance setting. So that's why I think this is really important. Now the issue is is once we bring our images in tow, light room, late room drops, thes picture styles and it goes back to what we call Adobe Standard, which is adobes interpretation of that raw file and will flesh that a little bit more. We get in a post processing. So what I want you guys to take away from this is that even though you're setting a picture style in your camera when you're shooting on when you're shooting raw images, it's actually not gonna translate all the way through to the post processing. So we're merely setting this up for, um uh, for our edification out in the field so that we can really make the good decisions that we need. Teoh. Okay, so next up, LCD brightness. Uh, it's no mystery. It's dark at night. Right, You guys. So what happens when it gets dark at night? Um, and we're outside for a long extended period of time. We begin to get what's called night adjusted vision means our people's air getting really wide to gather all that light in. And, um, it can actually be painful to have these really wide open pupils. And suddenly you're you're LCD pops on in the back, and the light is really super bright. It kind of hurts your eyes. So what we're gonna dio is we're gonna lower r l C D brightness so that it's much more dim than we would ever use it in the daytime now, Remember that LCD? Um, almost all of it, at least on all the cameras. I know if they, uh they adjust the brightness. So if it's too bright, if it's really bright outside the monitor, get bright. Um, if it's darker, it closes down and darkens down a little bit. But, um, by manually adjusting our LCD brightness, what we're able to do is push this to its lowest setting possible, which the camera really rarely gets to. Now, once our LCD is much more dim, were able to get a much better feeling for what are images look like Now we're not going to depend on the LCD for our exposure. We're gonna talk about history, RAM and overexposure warning. But it's inevitable that we will be influenced by the first thing that pops up. We've got to fully understand how the history am works if we're gonna come up with good exposures. And what's that saying in real estate? Location, location, location? Well, with digital photography, it's exposure, exposure, exposure. We want to get a good exposure. The better we do out in the field, the more information we can gather on our sensor. The, uh, the more we're gonna be able to do back in post processing, right? So the history ram is definitely the best way to check that. You've got what you need out in the field. It's so important, You guys, we need to see it right away. Um, I know what's exciting. You know, you've just spent a minute or two walking around taking a picture like, Oh, gosh, I wanna look at the photograph, you know, and that LCD is so seductive. You know, you just see your photograph, you get all happy. But the truth of the matter is, that's really not the first thing we want to see when our image pops up. So my recommendation is to understand on your particular camera how you get that else or how you get that hissed a gram popping up immediately. Once we get our history, am popping up after we've taken every shot. The big question is, how do we read it? All right, well, you guys, this is the thing. The height of the spike of the hissed a gram is really pretty irrelevant. What that is just telling us is that there's a lot of information in that particular tone. So let's say you're photographing Ah, solid white snowfield. You would end up with a really big spike on the right hand side of the history. All right, you could tell that also, just by looking around your camera going, he it. There's a whole lot of weight out there, so the height of the spike simply says how much information is out there, and that's not really all that important to us. But what is really important to us is the side to side reading of this hissed a gram. That's what we want to pay attention to. So now remember, the history RAM itself is just It's a graphic representation of how the tones lay out in your photograph, and the way the tones layout from right to left is the blacks and dark grays or on the left hand side of the history. And that's always every camera and the right hand side are the light, grays and white. And this is important for us, you guys. This is what we need to really pay attention to because we do not want to grossly over expose our highlight values. It's an avid will. We will end up with some shadow clipping, and that's okay. But this particular hissed a gram is of a very flat seen. This is a very low contrast. Seems a matter of fact. You can see we don't have any highlights, No bright whites in this in this scene at all. Um, and we also don't have any deep blacks in this scene. So this is a very low contrast seen now if I made a different exposure of this particular, uh, seen and my history am ended up there, what would happen is that tail into the instagram is going outside of the box. And when it does, that's telling us it's going to be under exposed. We also call that your your shadows air clip there clipping your shadows. Uh, likewise, if the history and was pushed all the way in the other direction, we'd be clipping our highlights. If that information goes outside the box, they're gone. And the thing about it is is once our highlights are gone there, either nearly it nearly impossible to get back. This sister Graham, is what I would consider Fine hissed a gram of a very average seen so you can see the spike is right here in the center on. That's representing a whole bunch of mid tones. And, well, this photograph is just a bunch of mid tones. There were not any really super bright highlights. There's not any super dark shadows, and this is what our hissed a gram looks like. That being said, we also have to realize that we don't want to become a slave to this idea that the history am should always be a perfect you know, spike in the middle and come right down to the edges. Because again, the history am simply represents what you are shooting. So if you're photographing something like a snow scene that has no shadow detail in it, there is no reason that the history am should be shoved all the way to the left. And as a matter of fact, there's no reason the hissed a gram should be in the center of all, because we want that information of the spike to be over the tone that it represents and you'll remember from that earlier slide. The right hand side represents the break areas, so this history and perfectly represents the snow scene. Now, if I was shooting something that was very dark, like this. Ah, Vignette of a black train here. The history, um, should be all the way to the left hand side. Now, all that information is over the darker values, this is what we want. So let's get away from the idea that there is any such thing as a perfect test a gram and simply realized that the history represents what we're shooting. Okay, so these were some weird hist a grams, or I shouldn't say we're but a little bit odd and that were photographing just something that's overall dark or just something that's overall break. Um, general photography history, and they're gonna look more like this were spread all the way out. So here this photograph does have some deep blacks. His photograph does have some some bright whites in the in the water. And again, this is going to be more typical of what? We see the same thing here photographing at dusk. You can see that the history, um, comes right down to the right hand corner, which means we're not clipping. We're not over exposing our highlights. This is what we want. This is the proper exposure for the scene. When we start looking at night time exposures in nighttime, hissed a grand's, they're probably going to change a little bit. So again, here the hissed a gram is pushed all the way to the left and you say, Well, why is that Washington history and be right in the center right? Or perfect little history? Well, not really. If it was in the center, it would look like daytime, and that would look strange because we're out photographing at night. Now there's something to be said for allowing a little bit more light in. If this instagram was pushed over to the right, what I would do is, uh, in post processing. I would darken it down to make it look like this, and that adds some advantages. But in general, this is a good one shot, hissed a gram of a night scene. So, of course, are night scenes are going to be rife with dark areas everywhere. The sky is dark and we've got dark pavement here and again, all our information is lumped up on the left hand side, so hissed A grams like these air just fine for nighttime photography, when we're dealing with light painting. The area that we're painting is actually pretty darn important, right? If I overexposed this cross, I've basically just blocked up all the detail that's truly important to the scene. So I find that getting in and setting up your overexposure warning on your camera is really important. A night photography. Sometimes you're gonna ignore those blink ease. But many times we're gonna give us information that we need Teoh to make good decisions. Okay, Next up, we'll just do a couple of other things that we're gonna check out here. I ii eso is at 100. That's not a bad starting point. It's getting a little dark, so I'm gonna crank that up to 200 and my white balance is set to daylight. Now, I typically set my white balance of daylight as I start off, if I begin shooting and heck, we could even be doing a little light painting right now if we wanted to, but, um but right now it is still daylight. So I'm gonna leave my camera set to daylight. Um, as we talked about in the studio, you'll see that we can change our Kelvin temperature. We're definitely gonna be doing that, uh, as the night progresses. So next up, what we're gonna check is make sure we have access to our hissed a gram, a zai mentioned. We want to We want to really see her picture. But ultimately, our exposure is the most important thing that we're talking about. So let me just take a quick picture here. We'll get a photograph up, and then we'll be able to view our history. All right, so it looks like artist a gram is popped up right away on a Nikon camera. This thumb, Neil, this thumb wheel is going to allow us to change through our different monitor views. So, as you can see, as I go up, I get a full view as I come down and get some information about my file. I got ta go through. I can see my overexposure warning, which is what we'll talk about in here in a second on and then eventually get back to see my history. Ram, this is gold people. This is what we want to see. So what we're gonna see is that my history has moved to the right. So I need to let less light in. That was three seconds at F eight. So what we'll do is we'll crank that down. Just a touch. We'll go down to about us. Uh, let's go down to one to stop in 1/3 See if we get some detail in the sky. And once again, you can see our history. Ram is still a little bit blown out. Now, this is the type of thing we're gonna be one look for when we're shooting our city lights later on. I don't want to blow out my highlights too much. Although it's inevitable city lights will get a little bit right. But in this case, it's just a hair to break. So once again, I'll come down just a touch more and we'll do about second and third. See what that produces for us all right, now we can see that artist a gram has come right down in this corner, which is what I want. And if I really want a bigger hissed a gram, I could move to the next screen. And if I need to examine my full image, you can see that I could just toggle through that now. Like I said, every camera's gonna be a little bit different. I know. With cannons, it's usually info, button or display button that you can hit to pull these up. But no matter how you slice it, you're gonna wanna have quick access to that history ram and know how to get to it. Okay, So along with the history Ram, folks, what we want to pay attention to is our overexposure. Warning? We showed you how earlier today how you can set that up on your camera. Now, here it is, in life practice. When we pull it up, we can see that the RGB highlights is set here and you could see that the camera is blinking telling me that my highlights are too bright in a scene like this. I really don't want to blow out my sky. I want some structure. I want some detail in there. So that would tell me again, along with the history Ram, that I need to close down my exposure a little bit