Articles Tagged with: photography

One Last Wedding?

Last fall I came to an important decision in regards to my photography career. I realized I do not love shooting weddings. Don’t get me wrong, I love to see a couple make a commitment to each other. But, I don’t like the traditions. I don’t like to see a young couple start their life together with a giant expense for what amounts to a party they feel obligated to throw. There’s this pressure to keep up with the ever expanding Disney-style princess wedding day that they’ve been brainwashed to believe they’re destined to experience through a lifetime assault of commercialized popular culture. The fire is fueled with Pinterest boards to find the perfect decorations and party favors, and countless wedding blogs telling you what you have to spend your money on. Not to mention local, regional, national, & global bridal magazines to make every decision feel inadequate unless you go all out.

So I stopped taking wedding jobs altogether. I would rather someone pay their hard earned money with a photographer who’s passionate about wedding photography, of which there are plenty in the Charleston area.

It was like a weight was lifted off of my shoulders – I gave something my all and learned that it wasn’t for me.

But…

There’s always a but.

Look at that face on the groom as he catches his first look at his new bride-to-be walking down the isle. That’s my brother-in-law Chip. How could I not shoot this guy’s wedding? Look at him – He’s awesome. So, I strapped on my 70-200 and decided to ride that horse into battle one more time. Besides, look at his wife – She gorgeous! This won’t be hard at all.

The Wedding of Chip & Pie | May 30th, 2015 | The Martha Washington Hotel in Abingdon, VA

The Bride & Her Bridesmaids:

The Groom & His Groomsmen:

The Wedding Ceremony:

With this ring…

Just married:

The Reception:

Dinner, dancing, & this guy:

So, this Grinch still managed to let his heart grow a few sizes bigger that day.

I’ll admit, I had a lot of anxiety about writing this. It’s not fair to the couple to attach my personal baggage, but I just didn’t want to publish a wedding blog post and have the brides I’ve turned down see it and think I was a liar. I’ve been nothing but honest on this blog about my journey in photography and art, so I hope you understand.

Good luck Chip & Pie, you guys rock.

Transitions

Wow – The last you heard from me on the blog I was selling off a bunch of gear, and then… Nothing.

If I wasn’t me and I saw that happen to another professional, I’d think that they gave up and closed shop.

2014 was my best year in the photography business yet, but by the end of it I didn’t appreciate that fact at all. I realized that the sole reason I got into photography was to be creative, and I started to become bitter at a lot of the business side of things. I already run a very busy consulting business and I was burning the candle at both ends. I hired staff to run my other business so I can focus on being more creative, but guess what? I ended up managing those people, which took up even more of my time.

I also began resenting requests to recreate what clients saw on social media from other photographers. I couldn’t help but think “Why don’t you find the person who shot that and hire them instead?” Combine that resentment with people contacting me for jobs and saying things like “I love your work but I don’t want to spend a lot of money” or the constant requests for usage with no compensation.

It’s more than enough to make someone walk away.

But I’m not walking away. I’m transitioning my focus.

I’ve been saying no a lot. Not to jobs that make me nervous, but to jobs that I’ve tried before and realized are not for me. It’s not about what I’m good at, it’s about what I love doing. If I’m not loving the work, there’s no point in doing it.

I don’t want to capture templates of life.

I wan’t to capture real moments and authentic emotions.

You know, actual life.

Furthermore, I want to create. But how do you create something using real life? Once I direct a subject, or manipulate a scene, aren’t I manufacturing reality and creating something that wasn’t there naturally? How the hell do I interpret a real emotion or moment and make something out of it without betraying the authenticity of the medium?

I just don’t know.

But I’ve got to ask myself, do I even care about the authenticity of the medium in that way anymore?

I do care about capturing life. I do care about making art. So I began focusing heavily on something else while looking for answers.

I found a group of artists from all walks of life, both amateur and professional, who attend drawing from life sessions at different locations in the area every week. I tried doing something I’d never done before – Drawing live models. The focus on drawing a timed sketch of a human is not on the exact realistic representation of the model. It’s about the gesture. It’s about the body language. The essence of the subject is more important than anything else.

I really liked this one tonight - Mary at #TheArtistsLoft in #MountPleasant

15 minute #sketch #FigureDrawing #graphite #fabercastell #livemodel

Pastel #FigureDrawing from life #20Minutes

Like photography, technique comes into play. There are also tools of the trade (although pencils and paper are pretty accessible in comparison to lenses and lights). I do find myself “geeking out” over a brand of pencils or a type of paper. It’s part of who I am. Give me too many pencils and I’ll stress out over which thickness is best for whatever I’m drawing. It’s just like packing too many lenses for a job. I make better work when I limit myself (I hope that sinks in one day). The gear is all a noisy distraction.

I also started to practice drawing from photos again. When there’s more time to draw, I find that the muscle memory of drawing gesture from a live model is taking over first. Once I realize that I have time to relax, I’m able to focus on the technique again. The more I practice both drawing live models and from reference photos, the better I’ll be equipped to capture both gesture and accuracy without even thinking about it.

Here’s a pastel drawing I recently made from a reference photo:

Trying a different medium tonight. #Pastel #FigureDrawing #PhotoReference #fabercastell #Strathmore #Female #Nude

This is a piece I made for my wife using a photo I took years ago as a reference:

Pastel Elephant Drawing for Amy by Joseph W. Nienstedt

So, what does this all mean?

What I’m looking to create photographically and through drawing and painting is starting to come a little more into focus for me.

I know I want authenticity, but not technical authenticity.
I want emotional authenticity.

But how do I achieve that? I guess the simplest way is for me to believe it first. I have to believe the image. If I know I’m not being genuine, then chances are everyone else knows too. I’m a terrible liar anyway. The challenge is to take that authentic gesture, or emotion, or general essence of whatever I’m trying to capture and use my technical skill to push the envelope. I need to marry the real with the surreal but not force it.

So while all of this is swimming in my head and weighing on my heart, I happened to catch a very inspiring talk at The Citadel last night by an artist and gallery owner named Robert Lange.

As he told his story and talked about his craft, I was mesmerized. Here’s a guy who’s clearly gone through all of this shit already and is still struggling with identifying himself to himself. I know it’s not necessarily news to most people that artists don’t tend to settle, but the honesty he used in conveying that was enlightening.

He reflected on his college years and how he worked harder than anyone in his classes – Staying up all hours working on his paintings and making work that looked exactly like his subjects, and when it was time for a critique from working artists, they all told him that art wasn’t for him. They said he lacked soul in his work. So, feeling dejected, he decided make paintings of his puppy and his fiancée because he genuinely loved them and they made him feel good about life. Lo and behold, when the artists saw these new paintings, they praised his work. They could see his passion through his brush strokes – He just needed to paint what he truly cared about.

He showed us the different bodies of work that he’s created, and his natural progression of creativity covers 15 years of artwork. 15 years is a long time, but it’s also a blink of an eye. It’s easy to download a band’s whole catalog of music, or see an artists whole portfolio of work and get discouraged. We get this instant gratification but lose the sense of time that went into creating that work. We immediately think “I’m nowhere near as talented as that guy” and put down our camera/guitar/paint brush in disgust.

There’s something missing in conveying that time in the creative world. The journey is just as important, if not more important than the work for an artist. In the end though, the work is what lives on. It’s sad until I think of the current popular culture of people being famous for being famous. When they die, there’s no work to show for their fame so their fame dies with them.

During Robert’s talk, he mentioned that photographers should take as many portraits of strangers as possible. He does that to capture people off guard and being themselves. If he uses their portrait to create a painting, he sends them a print of that painting. They have no idea that he’s going to do that either, so there’s no pretense to it for them – I imagine that they’re just signing what amounts to being a photo release and then months later a print of a stunning piece of artwork shows up at their door.

After his talk, I ran to my car and grabbed my camera. I decided as the talk came to a close that I would take his portrait. Who knows, maybe I’ll make a painting of it one day…

Very inspiring talk from @paintdifferent of @RobertLangeStudios at #BehindTheLens tonight at #TheCitadel - I took his portrait when he was done #CHS #CHSArt

So, what exactly is it that I’m transitioning my creative focus to?

I’ll let you know when I find out.

Until then, I’m going to enjoy capturing the search.

Thanks for reading.

-Joe

Multiple Exposure at BarCampCHS 6

I’ve led a photographically themed session at the annual BarCamp “unconference” in Charleston since 2010, with sessions on post-processing, lighting, retouching, and iPhonography. This year I tried to tap into the technical aspects of creative photography that have existed since the film days – Multiple exposures. We explored two different techniques, one involving a long exposure with multiple speedlights, and the other using the in-camera multiple exposure feature.

The first demonstration involved off-camera lighting. I used two speedlights and radio triggers to get this effect. I use Cactus v5 radio triggers, which allow me to assign a separate channel to each flash as well as fire them both at the same time. I set the flash on camera left to channel 3 and the one on camera right to channel 2. I set the camera to bulb mode, shut off all of the lights, and shot at ISO 100 and f/9 from a tripod. Rachel is the model, and her brother controlled the radio channels. As I held the shutter open, I had her do each pose and had her brother switch to the appropriate channel and fire the flash. This was the result:

That’s not a Photoshopped image. It’s all one exposure as far as the shutter actuations are concerned. The multiple exposures come from the separate speedlight actuations. Pretty cool, huh?

The next technique is a function of most DSLRs – a feature called “Multiple Exposure”. I learned something new about this feature on my Nikon – It’s not available when you’re shooting tethered! Oh well, after a long minute of trying to figure out why I couldn’t get it to work, I unplugged my camera from the presentation computer and got started. The way I set my camera up this time was to set the Multiple Exposure setting to 2 images in a series and then disable the auto-gain. For the effect of constraining the 2nd exposure within the 1st exposure’s silhouette, I wanted the background to be blown out (which is why you want to disable the auto-gain). This technique doesn’t require any special lighting, but since we were in a classroom, I used my speedlights to blow out a white wall behind my subjects.

This is John, who certainly had the best beard in the whole conference (probably in all of the Charleston peninsula for that matter). Another attendee had this vibrant purple paisley laptop bag with her that I used for the second exposure. Together they made quite the juxtaposition:

We had time for one more example, so using the same technique, I had this idea that came from something I saw that day at the College of Charleston campus. All over the walkways there were messages about speaking out about rape. There were hashtag messages such as #nomeansno and #itsnotyourfault written in chalk everywhere.

I asked my daughter Mackenzie to pose with a very sad and angry expression, and then I got a few people to stick their hands out for the second exposure. The idea of the shot was to see where you can take the technique creatively. In trying to make a visual interpretation of these messages we all saw that day, this was the result. I didn’t let on that that was what I was going for while we were setting this up because we were having fun during the session, so I hope that anyone who was there didn’t misinterpret my light-hearted presentation as making light of the seriousness of sexual assault in all of its forms.

Finally, I once again had the pleasure of shooting the group photo for the conference. Here’s most of the attendees and volunteers who make BarCampCHS happen every year:

And here’s a photo of me taking that photo, courtesy of Andy Paras form the Post & Courier:

Creating Shelly Waters’ Imagery for Drive

The road to the image above was long and hard-fought. The shoot was a total of 773 images, including test shots and all. Some days you have to work harder than others. There have been more than a few times that the first few images of a shoot are the strongest. Sometimes you have an immediate connection with your subject, the light is right, the mood is clicking, and the stars are aligned. Other times you have to build. You create a foundation, you lay the concrete and build up on top of it one piece of timber at a time. The end result is hopefully something you’re proud of. Those images seem to have a special place in my heart, mainly because I knew what it took to get there.

It’s not the subject’s fault either – Obviously the image was/is in them all along. It’s just that some days are harder than others. The trick is in working your way though those days and going back to the basics of everything you know about relationships, art, and technical ability.

If a person starts off a shoot by telling you that they’re terrible in front of the lens, yet when you’re talking to them beforehand they’re full of energy and charisma, you know that they’re full of crap (I mean that in an endearing way). But, they don’t know that. It’s time to become a creative psychologist and figure out the problem and create a solution. You pull out your potato peeler and start peeling back that tough skin.

I loosen up the subject and ask them to do some awkward things that get them out of their head. I make sure the music is making them move when they think I’m not paying attention. I pull out some strange props or ideas to see how they handle it…

The hair/make-up artist is a valuable tool to break any tension. It’s a person who you can bounce ideas off of and he or she can be a real confidence booster when they start getting excited.

Amanda Rose assists Shelly Waters

But, once the subject starts to open up, then I start to act like a personal trainer – It’s my job to keep pushing the subject to their limit. I’ve gained their trust and now I’m bending it as far as I can. I’m forcing them to react by shouting, laughing, dancing around the set… Whatever it takes to get their personality to appear vividly in a two dimensional photograph.

At the end of any job, I ask myself “How was the experience?”. A shoot like this one was long, but it went by quickly. We struggled but we ended up laughing. There’s a valid reason why I love shooting people, and it’s simply the human experience of it. My day is filled with little interactions, but when I can work so intimately with another person I barely know in such a unique way and come out with a memorable experience as well a piece of art, that’s a good day on the job.

Here’s Shelly Waters’ new cover artwork for her latest record, “Drive” (click here to go grab a copy from her website):

I Am Not A Wildlife Photographer…

I’m not a wildlife photographer…

But I love to shoot the birds and bugs in my backyard.

I’m not a landscape photographer…

But I love to capture the beauty around me.

I’m not a sports photographer…

But I love to witness mad skillz, yo.

I’m not a street photographer…

But I love to find art in the moment.

I’m not a fashion photographer…

But I love to collaborate with artists to make something interesting.

I’m not an architectural photographer…

But I love to witness man’s feats of greatness.

I’m not a portrait photographer…

But I love to see a part of a person’s personality conveyed in an image.

I’m not a wedding photographer…

But I love to see a bride looking her best.

I’m not an abstract photographer…

But I love to see the Devil in the details.

I’m not a maternity photographer…

But I love to see a woman becoming a new mother.

I’m not a pet photographer…

But I love to capture an old man saying goodbye to his old best friend.

I’m not a music photographer…

But I love music and I think it’s what saved my life.

I’m not a headshot photographer…

But I love to capture a person the way I see them.

I’m not a fitness photographer…

But I love to capture a person in the best physical shape they can be in.

I’m not an editorial photographer…

But I love to make a portrait that tells a story.

I’m not an event photographer…

But I love an opportunity to score a free beer (or seven).

I’m not a fireworks photographer…

But I love to see things that go boom!

I’m not a travel photographer…

But I love to see new places and faces.

I’m not a fine art photographer…

But I love to stretch my imagination.

I’m not a family photographer…

But I sure do love my family.

I’m not any single kind of photographer.

I’m all of them and none of them.

I’m just a person who loves to capture life in a bottle so I can open it up and share it with everyone else every once in a while.

Summer Time

It’s been a very busy year so far – July 4th seems to sneak up and remind me just how fast time slips by. I’ve been busy growing my other business while still working this one. In fact, I surprised my crew yesterday by dragging in a light and a backdrop to the office for some surprise headshots:

Rashaud

Ben

Speaking of headshots, I’ve been doing a lot lately for various professionals in the area. A few years ago, you could only thrive from doing headshots in a major market, but because of social media every professional needs one, not just actors and comedians.

Here’s a couple I did this past week:

Dr. Kelsey Harris

Dr. Molly Slade

I’ve also discovered that my Fuji X-T1 is quite the capable headshot camera. The two headshots of the guys in my crew were taken with the Fuji, while the two doctors were taken using my Nikon D800. While the flexibility gained by the controls, full frame sensor, and lens selection of the Nikon are paramount to shooting professionally, the Fuji’s results are almost indistinguishable when the output is simply an internet profile picture. The only drawback I found with my current lighting rig is that I need to close down the aperture on the Fuji a couple of stops because it shoots natively at ISO 200 and it’s a cropped sensor. That leads to more depth of field when shooting with strobe lights. For headshots like these, it’s not a problem though. For creative portraiture using these strobes it might be limiting, but I think a ND filter or two would help in that case. The look of a lens at it’s proper focal length that you get from a full frame sensor when compared to a cropped one can’t be beat, but like the US Soccer team’s performance in the World Cup game against Belgium, it comes really close by giving it its all – And that’s nothing to be ashamed of.

Sorry, I fell into a technical wormhole. Back to the photos…

Shepard Fairey Installation At The Sottile Theater

If you haven’t stopped by the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art to see the exhibit of Shepard Fairey and Jasper Johns, you’ve got ’til July 12th to do so. The work is amazing and inspiring. Shepard Fairey has a few installations in the Charleston area, including the one above at the storefront of the Sottile Theater on King Street. There’s also a few murals that he’s put up, such as this one on one of the College of Charleston’s dormitories:

Selective Color Still Lives!

I do love some street art. In the right places, like the back alleys of the city where people store their trash, they bring color and joy. I find the story told by the street artists to be just as compelling as the story told by the architects on the main streets.

The Other Part Of King Street

On another note, every once in a while I get reminded of just how amazing the camera in my pocket (the iPhone) is. I snapped this little dragonfly while walking into a client’s office the other day:

Dragonfly Instagram

I also got to go to a wedding that I wasn’t working at for the first time in a looooong time. I still managed to take a few photos, but only because I wanted to, not because I had to!

Samantha & Jerry

I’ve been seeing as much music as possible and spending some great time with my daughter in the process. We had front row center seats to see the Head and the Heart and Valerie June recently:

The Head and the Heart

Valerie June

At the start of the summer I surprised my daughter during our “school’s out weekend trip to Disney World” with a visit to Universal Studios to see Huey Lewis & The News!

Huey Lewis & the News

Speaking of Disney World, I captured this family photo with a Rokinon fish-eye lens on my Fuji X-T1 while we rode Primeval Whirl in the Animal Kingdom:

The Nienstedt Family

And while we were walking through Epcot’s World Showcase, we ran into some old friends. It’s Paulie Latex and Jenny Jelly of Latex Generation fame! Paul used to sing and play guitar in my band and Jen was our merch girl. I wrote a song about them when we were teenagers about how they would never last. I then wrote a song a few years later about being astonished that they were still together. Now they’ve got 3 girls and have been together for somewhere near 20 years. Holy crap was I wrong!

Latex Generation Family Photo Disney World 2014

Photo by Mrs. Edel

Local artist Patch Whisky asked me to shoot some of his artwork to be reproduced as prints that he’s now selling on his website. It was a different animal to shoot his monsters, but they sat well for the shoot…

Patch Whisky

On the topic of artists, I sadly had to say goodbye to one of my favorite artists who gathered his family up and moved to the West Coast. Here I am getting one last tattoo from Rob Junod at Holy City Tattooing Collective:

Getting the Junod one last time (In Charleston) #holycitytattooingcollective #tattoo #IWantYourSkull #nipslip #organicsweater

Rob Junod & a Shirtless Me

Rob’s wife, Amanda Rose, is a talented hair & make-up artist. I worked with with her recently for Shelly Waters, who hired me to shoot the cover of her upcoming CD. I’m bummed that the Junods had to leave, but I’m happy to see where their journey takes them as they are both immensely talented.

Shelly Waters and Amanda Rose

And finally, since we’re on the topic of tattoos and art, my wife Amy paid a visit to Margo at Holy CIty Tattooing Collective just yesterday to start work on a new piece on her bicep. It’s just an outline in this picture and it already looks amazing!

Amy

I think that about wraps it up for this post. We’re planning a road trip later in the summer, so hopefully I’ll capture some fun photos of that adventure. It’s gonna be filled with plains, trains, and automobiles for sure!

Photo-Centric Social Media Explosion

I’ve been quite a busy bee lately, and unfortunately I’ve been neglecting you fine readers. One of the things I’ve been doing in my spare time (which is sparse) is checking out some of the newest social media sites. The one that’s been most intriguing to me has been Google’s Google+ (or Google Plus).

With it’s fair stance on content ownership, which basically reads that what you post is yours, not their’s, a large amount of Facebook-hating photogs have rushed to the new platform. There’s even a nifty Google Spreadsheet of thousands of photographers that are currently using the site. This is a very vibrant community that is still in Beta, and so far I find it a lot more fun and interactive than Facebook. It’s like a cross between Facebook and Twitter in that you can follow strangers/celebrities, but better because you can share only with specific groups of people as you see fit. I’m interested to see what happens when Google opens it up to the masses. Hit me up in the comments if you need an invite, as I usually have some in my account.

The next site I’ve been messing around on is 500px.com

500px.com started as a LiveJournal community back in the early oughts by two photographers, Ian Sobolev & Oleg Gutsol. The name came from early limitations the group set on photo sizes due to CRT monitors and slow internet connections. The original idea was to have a place for photographers to receive constructive criticism on their work. The site still aims at commentary by your peers, and it differentiates itself from Flickr by attracting artistic work instead of being a dumping ground for your cell phone shots or last night’s party pics. I find it very inspiring to browse the site’s most popular photos.

Finally, its a very quirky social experience that my wife turned me onto, Pinterest.com.

When my wife first told me about it, I thought Pinterest was going to be another bookmark site like Delicious.com. Once I looked at the site it reminded me more of Tumblr.com if it exploded all over your screen. It’s actually quite addicting, albeit hard to describe properly. The best advice I could give you is to go there and sign up (or hit me up for an invite in the comments). My first impression was that it was very feminine, but I quickly realized that it is what you make it by who you follow and what you post. Much like Delicious.com, they encourage you to create a “Pin It” link in your browser’s favorites to easily add any content you come across on the web to your “boards” (which are virtual cork boards that you can categorize your “pins” with).

Let me know if there are any other cool social sites for photographers that you use. Here’s my current list:

Flickr
Facebook
Twitter
Tumblr
Google+
500px
Pinterest

Photo Mystery Revealed

The photo above, which I have been calling “Abandoned Trailer” (and is also available to purchase as a print in the online store), was a mystery to me. I didn’t know why there were two of these sitting in the middle of a field all busted up with plastic wrapping laying on the ground all around them. I proudly displayed this photo at last year’s Kulture Klash Arts Festival, as well as received an honorable mention for it in the 2010 Coastal Carolina Fair photo contest. I had no idea about the actual history of my subject, until today.

I happened to be showing some of my work to some real estate agents at RE/MAX Advanced Realty in Mount Pleasant, SC, when the broker in charge, David Wertan, told me that he sold the two trolley cars a few years ago.

1/15th of a sec | f/11 | 11mm | ISO 200

David told me that the two trolley cars were actually somebody’s home in Charleston, and the owner, Jake Varner, had the two cars set together with an a-frame roof attached to the top and a porch in front all the way back in 1938. In 2005 David sold the two trolleys for Varner to the Magnolia Development group for $40,000. The group had planned to restore the cars in hopes to flip them for a profit. They tried to wrap the cars in plastic to protect them from the elements, but they have been vandalized so much that the task of restoring them has become very expensive.

1/30th of a sec | f/10 | 11mm | ISO 200

The local Charleston newspaper, The Post & Courier, has an article with all of the gory details. Now I know what they are and why the trolley cars are there – which was an unexpected thing to learn today, but I’m excited to now know. Do you have any photos that you’ve taken of something that was mysterious to you and wondered what the back story of the subject was? Did you ever find out?

Shallow Depth Of Field 101

1/30th of a sec | f/1.8 | 35mm | ISO 200

This is a post for the curious photography fans who have looked at a picture and wondered how to get control over making parts of the photo blurry and the main focal point razor sharp. The phenomenon is called a “shallow depth of field”, and what that means is that because a camera can only focus at one precise distance, the plane of focus in your photo is very small or shallow. In layman’s terms, it translates into this: If you have a large depth of field, more of your photograph will appear to be in focus, if you have a shallow depth of field, your focus is more selective. So, how do you control it?

The secret is a combination of things – Mainly your aperture, lens focal length, and your proximity to the subject. Let’s dissect the photo above to illustrate the effects of all of these elements to create that image.

First off is aperture. Aperture simply controls the amount or volume of light you let into the camera when the shutter opens. The larger your aperture, the more light is allowed in. The tricky thing to remember when you first learn about aperture is that the smaller the f-number, the larger the aperture. The effect on depth of field is that the larger the aperture, the shallower your depth of field becomes. The photo above is set at a very large aperture, which is written as f/1.8.

The effect of a shallow depth of field can’t be dialed in just with a large aperture, your lens’s focal length and the distance between your camera and your subject are just as important. I can shoot that same scene using the same settings, but back up the camera 10 feet and focus on the same spot and my whole body and most of the background will be in focus. That is because at 35mm, I’m at a relatively wide focal angle (even though on my cropped sensor D90, this is more like a 50mm lens, but the lens still performs as a 35mm lens optically – that’s a post for another day). So, in order to get the shot above I needed to put the camera very close to the subject (which is me BTW, this was a self portrait). In fact, when I made this photo, I had the headstock of my guitar only inches away from the lens. I chose my 35mm lens to take it because I wanted there to be a hint of the facial features defined as well as fit my upper body in the frame. In the shot below of my son holding a baby turtle, I used a 50mm lens and you can see that beyond the hands, everything becomes just a wash of color.

1/2500th of a sec | f1.8 | 50mm | ISO200

Since the focal length of the lens is greater and I’m probably about the same distance from my subject in both photos, you can see the difference that focal length of the lens makes.

What about the quality of the out of focus area?

The quality of the out of focus area is sometimes referred to as “bokeh” (which is a word that for some reason gives me the creeps). It’s based on the Japanese word “boke-aji”, which translates into “quality of blur”. Some fans of bokeh will define a good blur quality by the shape, size, and definition of the points of light that are out of focus. Basically, each point of light will take on the shape of the aperture opening, which is generally circular or polygonal. At a large aperture such as the two photos above, the blur is generally smooth. In the photo below, the aperture is a bit smaller, and you can see the points of light as circles in the trees behind the subjects.

1/125th of a second | f/6.3 | 85mm | ISO 450

Artistically, there is no right or wrong when it comes to bokeh, but it does help to understand how to control it – which in many cases comes down to the limitations of your lens. Below is an example of what I would call bad bokeh, because the blur looks unnatural and is distracting.

1/320th of a sec | F/5.6 | 300mm | ISO 200

The reason this is bad is that the circles have what appears to be vertical lines on them. In this shot it’s unnerving! That can happen for a number of reasons, commonly from a scratch or the introduction of dirt on the front of the lens. I believe this shot might be the victim of a fingerprint or dog hair, because using the same setup I took the following shot three minutes later which has much less of the line issue – I most likely wiped off the UV filter I keep on that lens.

1/40th of a sec | F/5.6 | 300mm | ISO 200

To sum it up, the best way for you to start experimenting with artistically creating a shallow depth of field is to set your camera to aperture priority mode, dial in the smallest f-number you can (which means the largest aperture), zoom your lens to the longest focal length, and get pretty close to your subject. From there you can start to play with your settings to see how your camera and lens handles each setting – remember, different lenses will produce different bokeh, so try and familiarize yourself with which of your lenses make the best bokeh for your vision of the photo you are trying to create.

Insta Vs. Hipsta

Made with the Instagram App on the iPhone

Instagram is the latest in mobile phone photography apps that has grown quite popular. The idea is not that new, in fact I don’t really think it’s the best app for creating vintage style photos – I think Hipstamatic does the job fantastically. Instagram does have one thing that it does much better though, and that is the ability to take photos fast and share them quickly.

Made on the Hipstamatic App on the iPhone

I know, I know… if it’s worth doing, it’s worth taking the time to do it right – But in the world of mobile phone photography, speed and convenience are king. Hipstamtic is a fun app to play around and experiment with, but if you want to catch the moment as it happens and not wait for unreasonable times between each shot, Instamatic will be the app you’ll want to fire up. I personally like to use the iPhone’s built-in camera app and then import the photos into my 3rd party apps – a feature that is unfortunately unavailable with Hipstamatic. I only use Hipstamatic if I have the proper time to set up and take the shot – with it’s selection of lenses and film types (which are available as packs that you have to purchase within the app), you can really make some beautiful photos.

I love these apps because mobile phone cameras are limited by their sensor sizes and resolution, and by exploiting that fact by stylizing the shots you make, you open up creative doors that you might ignore with a traditional camera. On the other hand, in the right situation with the right lighting, you can make some pretty damn amazing images with an iPhone. Over at fstoppers, Lee Morris has an excellent article demonstrating a fashion shoot captured using an iPhone 3Gs. Here’s the video of that shoot:

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