Apr 3, 2016, 10:26
It's that time of year again, when I am inspired to capture some of the beauty bursting forth everywhere. It is also Daffodil Time! This one is in our garden, but there are thousands along the road verges and in the parks and countryside.
I shot this with my Nikon D7100 and the ubiquitous 18-55mm f3.5-5.6 G VR lens that I keep in my bag only because it has VR as well as a handy close-focus ability. It's one of the most under rated lenses in the Nikon lineup! Used at f5.6 to f8 it can be tack sharp. This shot is hand held, but if I had used a tripod it would have been even sharper. The background is a piece of stiff black paper A3 size propped up about 12 inches behind the subject. I have cropped the sides of the image in to give a square picture.
I wanted the whites of the petals to be just inside the clipping point and the black background to be just above the block-out point. To achieve this, I set the camera to "A" (aperture priority mode) Jpeg fine, standard picture control setting, sRGB colour space, auto white balance, Iso 200 and I set an aperture of f8, which is where the little 18-55 lens is sharpest. To obtain the correct exposure settings I could have used a hand-held incident light meter but I am lazy so I decided to let the matrix metering do it's thing. It gave me a reading of 1/250th sec. Because the metering would be influenced by the large area of black background and therefore give a shutter speed that would try to brighten the background to a grey, I set an exposure compensation of -1EV. This forced the shutter speed to be one EV faster than the default meter reading, returning the background to something closer to black.
I could also have set the metering to "spot" and taken a reading from the flower, which would have resulted in an underexposed image, and a reading from the background, which would have resulted in an overexposed image, and then averaged the two readings to arrive at a starting point for a correct exposure and with a couple of test shots bracketed on either side I would eventually have arrived at the same settings.
In post, I cropped the sides in, I set the black point, the white point and I increased the vibrance slightly. I saved the result as a full-size Tiff with "master" appended to the file name and then exported the image as a Jpeg file re-sized to 1024px across, sRGB colour space, sharpened for screen.
Here is the original ex-camera image for comparison (downsized to 900px)
Now I hear a lot of mutterings about tone curves and histograms and centre weighted metering, sensor and lens resolution. Save it for a more advanced post - this is for beginners.
Let's see some of your shots of flowers. They are a wonderful subject and a gift from mother nature.
I shot this with my Nikon D7100 and the ubiquitous 18-55mm f3.5-5.6 G VR lens that I keep in my bag only because it has VR as well as a handy close-focus ability. It's one of the most under rated lenses in the Nikon lineup! Used at f5.6 to f8 it can be tack sharp. This shot is hand held, but if I had used a tripod it would have been even sharper. The background is a piece of stiff black paper A3 size propped up about 12 inches behind the subject. I have cropped the sides of the image in to give a square picture.
I wanted the whites of the petals to be just inside the clipping point and the black background to be just above the block-out point. To achieve this, I set the camera to "A" (aperture priority mode) Jpeg fine, standard picture control setting, sRGB colour space, auto white balance, Iso 200 and I set an aperture of f8, which is where the little 18-55 lens is sharpest. To obtain the correct exposure settings I could have used a hand-held incident light meter but I am lazy so I decided to let the matrix metering do it's thing. It gave me a reading of 1/250th sec. Because the metering would be influenced by the large area of black background and therefore give a shutter speed that would try to brighten the background to a grey, I set an exposure compensation of -1EV. This forced the shutter speed to be one EV faster than the default meter reading, returning the background to something closer to black.
I could also have set the metering to "spot" and taken a reading from the flower, which would have resulted in an underexposed image, and a reading from the background, which would have resulted in an overexposed image, and then averaged the two readings to arrive at a starting point for a correct exposure and with a couple of test shots bracketed on either side I would eventually have arrived at the same settings.
In post, I cropped the sides in, I set the black point, the white point and I increased the vibrance slightly. I saved the result as a full-size Tiff with "master" appended to the file name and then exported the image as a Jpeg file re-sized to 1024px across, sRGB colour space, sharpened for screen.
Here is the original ex-camera image for comparison (downsized to 900px)
Now I hear a lot of mutterings about tone curves and histograms and centre weighted metering, sensor and lens resolution. Save it for a more advanced post - this is for beginners.
Let's see some of your shots of flowers. They are a wonderful subject and a gift from mother nature.
GrahamS
Take my advice. I'm not using it.
