With the advent of Digital Cameras, the topic of white balance will pop up.  White Balance is basically telling the Camera to automatically determine the light color temperature or selecting it manually.  I can tell you from experience and by what people write that the correct white balance is critically important to capture the correct skin tone of your subjects.

The light’s color temperature varies throughout the day and from the type of light source being used.  Most flashes have a color temperature of about 5500 K.  Incandescent lights have a much lower temperature of around 2800  K.  Another interesting thing is that the lower the temperature is, it is called warmer and the higher the temperature is, is called cooler.  Shade for example may be around 7000 K and will be bluer.

We also have a thing called color cast.  This occurs when light is reflected off of a surface.   We shot a wedding in a forest setting.  You guessed it, their was a definite color cast from the reflected green leaves.  We also shoot in houses where the walls of the room might be pink, blue, brown, etc.  They are seldom white.

So how can be protect ourselves from all of these variations in color temperature?  Some times we can’t do much at the time of shooting and we must rely on the camera’s automatic white balance setting.  But there are several things that we can do to better help ourselves.

For example, we shoot in a local church that has very dark red brick walls.  We know this by just looking at the color of the walls and ceiling. Before the ceremony, we will shoot what is called a grey object.  That is something that is 18% grey.  Our photographers always carry this grey object.  That is very useful when using Lightroom and or Photoshop to correct the WB.  We could also shoot a color chart and repeat the about corrections and or shoot a white card or white object.

A white object can be the bride’s dress, or one of those special lens caps that you use to setup a custom white balance.  If you have a white Gary Fong dome cap, that works also.  You then tell the camera to use this image for your custom white balance.  Grey objects are great for getting the ideal exposure in your camera and by using the White Balance tool in Photoshop you can normally improve your white balance.  You can also use this WB tool and click on something white in the image.

When we shoot the formals in the church, we will be using a powerful directional fill flash from the side with a small amount of on camera fill flash.  This will help but we need to refine this a bit more.  Because we use Professional Cameras, we can shoot what is called a custom white balance.  We focus on a white object like the bride’s dress or use a white object over the lens and further tweak this by adjusting the light with a 73 setting.  The 73 setting is achieved by going to the white balance shift menu and setting the A and M settings to 7 and 3, hence “73″.  We use this all of the time but we must remember to change this Custom setting when we move to a different location.

The above makes our life 80% easier.  When we are shooting in an incandescent light setting, it is advisable to gel our flash.  We have special filters that fit over all of our flash heads with will give us a 2800 K color temperature.  All that is left is to set the camera to 2800 K and shoot away.  That works well.  When ever possible under these conditions, that is the best thing to do.  The filter that we use is called Color temperature straw: CTS-Full.

An alternative to “gelling the flash” might be to lower the effect of the ambient light by using a faster shutter speed.  It does how ever make sense to have all of your light that hits your subject at the same color temperature, hence gelling the flash would be the best method.

Now we need to look at our images in the proper environment.  What does that mean.  You know that beautiful $400 monitor you just bought?  Well unless it is around 100% Adobe RGB, it just might not be the right monitor to screen your images.  The standard monitor is only rated to 72% Adobe RGB.  (This information was found by searching the Samsung monitor site.  We currently use a Samsung and Dell monitor that have a Adobe RGB of about 100%).  That is not good enough for our work.  They don’t tell you this information because they don’t meet the specification.   You are Not finished yet.  Now you have to color profile your monitor.  The will require a $300 calibration  equipment and should be done before your process each wedding’s photos.  You also may need to color profile your printer to get the best results.  This takes a lot of time and money again for the equipment and the time to read the results off of the calibration chart that you just printed.  Can we now look at our images?  Not quite.  Remember that old color cast we spoke about?  Well the wall in your computer office should be painted 18% grey to prevent color casts and your lights should be 5500 K also.  Now you can look at your images.

So in summary, try to help your self Before you shoot.  Remember to carry a grey object/white object and above all shoot it in each and every room that you shoot photos. White objects are also useful.  Use a custom white balance when ever possible.  The use of directional off camera flash also helps to flood the subject with white light.  By doing all of the above, you may need very little color correction on the computer.

Note: We like to shoot the grey object but we also like to use a custom white balance via the lens cap combo or some alternative.  Time is always important when you have over 1000 images to process.  We also have software that can help to remove automatically color casts.  We use the NIK filters.

I hope that this small introduction to White Balance has been useful.  In addition to the above we have several Adobe Plugins and methods to help us properly correct the skin color.  Digital photography is much better than film.  It does however require a lot more work to produce the outstanding results that are expected by today’s Professional Photographers.  By knowing how to use your camera’s white balance and color temperature settings, you are always carrying with you 100′s of custom color filters.  By creatively using the color temperature, you can create very interesting images.

Post Note:  Grey and white cards, custom white balances may not always work 100% but you will be very happy to have their reference values at hand weeks after the wedding when you are tweaking some white balances.  There is another way in PS to correct WB and skin tones not mentioned here.  We use it when we get difficult images.  You can find it in the “Skin” book.  Fortunately, these methods work quiet well and are used by many photographers.  We stopped shooting the custom camera calibration charts.  It would take over 15min to calibrate such items.

One of my first posts was about image distortions.  Here is a typical example we see when photographing a wedding.  That is the very large object shot from ground level compared to a person.  It has a some what tall steeple This is a 150 year old country church which we want to display it’s uniqueness to the fullest.  The roof has warped in some areas and will not be touched up.

The happy couple love us but really do not want to pay for an UP-UP to lift me into the air by about 25-40 feet to the center of the church to get that perfect image.

Here is the before image.

As you can see, the image suffers from several areas.  The weather was not perfect but it did not snow or rain but the sky was overcast. The second problem is the normal distortion that we see when shooting objects from the wrong perspective angle.

Here is DXO to the rescue.  By using the correction tool and placing the rectangle in the column, we can correct this problem without using a crane to lift me into the air.  Here is the after solution.

I feel that this is much better and adds that sense of realism into the image.

But wait, the cloudy day is still with us.  First we have to get out one of those beautiful sky pictures that we took prior to the event.  We can use Photoshop to the rescue.  We select the image and go to the channels layer and select and make a copy of the blue channel.  We take this copy and use the curves layer to darken the foreground and lighten the sky.  A bit of touchups with the paint brush will be required to the building to darken all areas.  We then use this to make a mask over the image.  With the clouds on the top layer and the mask applied we get our final shot that we will be happy to place into the wedding album.

Here is the final shot.

You can be the judge.  Which image do you want to see in your wedding album?

This is what custom printing and editing of your memories is all about.  Making them and you look your best.  As you may recall from our Dec/2011 post, distortions can and do appear with wide angle shots and make the people at the corner of the image look wider and un-natural.  Again, we  process these images to remove this distortion so that you will not notice it.  I would like to show an example of this but do not want to offend any person in the image.

As I have mentioned before, there is no absolute when it comes to getting the correct exposure of an image.  That is the beauty of using a DSLR camera.  We can make daylight shots look like night time and evening time look a lot earlier in the day.

You can take a look at our silhouette with the flower girl and the bride.  In this image, one exposes for the outside and turns off the camera flash. Typically this appears several stops below the recommended exposure of this image. The camera must be on manual setting and you must check the view finder until you are happy with the image.  Yes, this is a special effect image which we try to capture when ever the location allows us to.  Each camera Stop reduces or increases the amount of light hitting the digital sensor.  For example, if we are shooting at 1/60 sec and go to 1/125 sec that is one stop.  The same is going from 400 ISO to 200 ISO and going from F 2.8 to F4.0 are all one stop less.  When shooting with no flash, just keep reducing the shutter speed until you get the desired results.  Here, the composition is striking.  We have the classic “image with in a frame.  The expression on the flower girls face is priceless.  It is a reminder of the classic paintings done by the “Masters” (please exclude the pun).  Very little touch-ups in Photoshop are required.  The blurring of the window glass will focus attention on the subjects and removal of unwanted objects to the right finish off the image.  It would be very difficult to get this lighting effect in Photoshop alone.

Getting the Correct Normal Exposure

I started shooting photography over 25 years ago with a SLR film camera. Every thing was manual. ASA or what we now call ISO was normally fixed to the film being used. This limited us to say 100 or 400 ASA. Now we adjusted the F-stop for depth of field and brought the exposure to the recommended value using the shutter speed. This was a good way to learn about exposure.

We still had the in camera exposure meter that was setup for a 18% grey body. Nothing much has changed there. We still had to look at the scene and expose for the proper grey body. Film did however give you some latitude, during processing.

Exposure with Digital Cameras

We have several options, like: Automatic : Shutter Priority: Aperture Priority : Manual Exposure: ISO: Hand Held Light Meter

The in camera light meter still meters for a 18% grey body. Nothing changed here. The ISO now can be changed for every image, plus it’s range can go from 50 ISO to well over 6400 ISO. What ISO should we use? We always try to use the lowest ISO (50-100) . The reason is because the image quality is the best at the lower ISO’s. Image quality is dependent on dynamic range, color, and noise. Every image has some noise no matter what camera is being used. The good thing is that we can’t normally see it and or we can remove it with the modern noise removal software.

Today, we can effectively shoot at 800 ISO or higher and achieve an excellent image quality, especially when using fill flash. As a rule of thumb, the highest ISO setting from the manufacture minus two stops, normally will give very good images. Expect to be able to shoot at 12,800 in the near future with the newest cameras (two or more stops from the top setting).  By shooting at 800 ISO, verse 100 ISO, you reduce your camera flash power requirements by about 3 stops.

For the correct exposure we can use the histogram and the built in camera “blinkies” to achieve the desired exposure.  As a Canon user, the histogram is divided into 5 sections.  Exposing in the first 1/3 of the farthest right section normally yields perfect results.  Check the exposure for the “blinkies” on the wedding dress or subject.  If present, reduce exposure via  off camera flash power, shutter speed, ISO and lastly F-stop.  In wedding photography, every thing moves a rocket speed, so getting that perfect exposure is very important.  Also, for those critical images, shoot in camera Raw as it will help you with post processing the exposure and white balance.  Remember, not all images fit the perfect histogram curve.  A dark image will be properly exposed to the left side of the histogram while a bright window or light in the background can move the histogram to the far right, throwing the blinkies on the bright areas in the background.

If time permits, and you are in a constant light setting, you can set the exposure using a grey card and adjust your camera’s settings in manual mode.  When using off camera flash, we normally reduce the back ground exposure by one stop to help saturate colors and to make the subjects pop off the image.  Very few photographers use a hand held light meter unless you want to set up studio lights.

I will discuss White Balance in our next blog.

Just like there is no absolute when looking at the exposure of an image, so is true about Distortion in an image.

There are two main categories of image distortion.

1. Caused by Equipment
2. Caused by improper use of equipment

1.0 Distortion Caused by the Equipment

We all have seen a photograph of a person or group of people taken using a Fish-eye Lens. A Fish-eye lens is a lens found in the Ultra Wide Angle Lens group. Normally it is between 8-16mm with distortion on the edges. This distortion can also be removed by software but we use it to capture large group shots or special shots say of the bride entering the church. We try to take at least 10 shots per wedding with the Fish-eye Lens. These normally are very High Quality Lenses costing around $1000 per so not everyone has one to use.

I will divide the Lenses into 7 groups for ease of discussion:

1. Normal view on a 35mm Full Frame Camera with a 50mm Lens. This is what a person would normally see with their eyes.
2. Telephoto Lenses- Any lens above 50mm that will magnify the image. This can go from a 50-100mm portrait type lens all the way up to and over 500mm.

3.0 Wide Angle Lenses – 24-50 mm ie below 50mm focal lenght

4.0 Ultra Wide Angle Lenses 12-24 mm (Architectural and wedding photography to capture more of the scene).

5.0 Fish-eye Lenses 8-16mm typical

6.0 Macro Lenses (for up close and personal – flowers and insects or anything small)

7.0 Tilt-shift Lenses (Architectural)

The types of distortion that we will find built into Camera Lenses and equipment are both Optical and Geometrical distortions.

A. Optical Distortions cover: Lens distortion, Vignetting, color fringing, lens softness (lens blur). Lens distortion covers barrel and pin cushioning, complex distortion, circular Fish-eye distortion

B. Geometrical distortions- Volume anamorphosis (people – objects get distorted at the outer edge of an image when using a Wide Angle Lens), key stoning/ horizon – objects do not appear straight or the horizon is curved.

2. Caused by improper use of equipment and angle taken of the image relative to the subject.

This type of problem can be prevented in the most part.  We were at one of our Custom Labs yesterday and Irene and I both love to look at other photographers albums and work. We are very critical of our own work so that we can bring our customers the best quality that we can.  Irene pointed out to me, “look at the mother of the bride” in this 3 person shot in their living room.  The person taking this must of been standing on a chair and shooting down!  To both of us, we grinched our teeth and said “and this is their wedding album”. Standing of a chair can be an excellent way to shoot some photos.  It is NOT the way to shoot group shoots – the people were terribly distorted IMHO.

Think that you are standing on a set of Rail Road tracks looking into the distance.  This is called perspective. The tracks appear to be converging but we know that they are always equal distance apart.  That is what happened here. The head and shoulders were large and the body and legs looked short. Not at all flattering to anyone.  Is is an example of a highly specialized photographic technique used in the wrong manor.  Used correctly with the right lens and F-Stop, you can get wonderful pictures, normally close-up head shots only.

For group shots, the camera should be positioned about chest height of the subjects, so as NOT to add too much distortion.  A 50mm lens should be used.  Lighting is also an important part of this image and directional lighting should be employed to show the bride in the most flattering manor. The sensor frame  plane and the plane that your subject’s body must be the same.  Think of a large sheet of plywood behind the subject and the camera.  Both must be parallel to each other.  The photographer must always be aware of these planes when taking images of people.

Here is another example of shooting large groups of people.  We have a long line of say of 15-20 people.  What do people do?  Pull out the Wide Angle lens and shoot away. Perhaps the photographer couldn’t move back any further.  Result is poor aunt Martha has been stretched out looking like she was run over by a cement truck.  Uncle Fred on the other hand was too close to the camera and looks a bit like a giant compared to what he should look like.  The problem is the wrong lens for the type of shot or not enough room to take it correctly.  All of this type of geometric distortion is called volume anamorphosis and it can ruin a shot that people wanted to have in their album if NOT corrected during post processing.

Most professional wedding photographers will have the 70-200 mm telephoto lens as part of their kit. Telephoto lenses should be Image Stabilized or they will need to be mounted on a tripod. The rule of thumb is that your shutter speed should be the reciprocal of the focal length. Therefore for a 200mm lens, you should shoot at a shutter speed of 1/200th of a second or the Flash Syc speed of the Canon 5 D Mark II. Now add IS and you can drop up to 3 to 4 stops or 1/100, 1/50, 1/25, 1/15. For people photography, one should try to never shoot below 1/30 or 1/60 because people move. One should be very careful not to push IS beyond say 2 stops, but that is person dependent. The result will be camera motion blur in the image and another lost image for the day.

How to prevent or Correct these common Distortions in your Photographs?

It is the responsibility of the Photographer to know in advance about the equipment limitations and limitations when taking a photograph.  Sometimes your equipment will not focus properly.  We try to take 3 shots of each image to cover us on this one.  People also move their eyes and are easily distracted on a wedding day.

We know that even the best EOS Cameras from Canon, has these built in limitations and as soon as we finish shooting your wedding we load your memories on to our computer hard drive and store them in a RAID 1 system to ensure 100% file backup in case a hard drive fails.  We do NOT open these files to look at them but first process them all though a specialized Computer software to not only correct the above mentioned problems but to correct exposure, white balance, lens softness, add expanding the dynamic range of your images, remove any noise or deal with dust on the sensor.  Our sensors have dust cleaning built into them these days, but that was not the case 4 or so years ago.  It can take over 24 hours to process the 1000-2000 images that we took.  All of our cameras have dust removing sensors and most of our lenses above 50mm have Image Stabilization built in.

The good news is that you only see the images after this correction and are not handed images taken directly from the camera.  IMHO this is a MUST DO step in processing of your wedding images.  Again, when I speak with most other photographers, they never heard of this software? This has more importance as you try to print larger prints than 4×6 in images.

This is not the end of the line in our work flow, but rather the being.  It is then on to another software program called Lighroom and another called Photoshop.  Now the images are ready to burn to a disk for customer viewing.  All of this processing will take much more time and effort than some one who says, hey, I will give you the files from the camera. I have seen images taken by top professional photographers before and after processing and the difference is day and night.  Top photographers seldom give away their images for obvious reasons.

I will be posting things on a daily or so basis, so if you are a camera buff or a prospective customer who wants to know a bit more about photography link up to us and enjoy the articles.  As a former Microsoft Technical Trainer, with an excellent student rating, you might find these articles interesting. It is my way of twittering.  Enjoy and suggest any topics that you might want me to cover in the up and coming months.

Kirk W Masters

Professional Wedding and Portrait Photographer

K.W. Masters Photography offers our customers 3 basic Wedding Album layouts. One of the things that we do not like to see is a bride having a beautiful collection of her wedding day memories, tucked away in envelopes for no one to see.  This IMHO is almost as bad as paying $3k for a wedding video that you watch normally twice:The first and last time. Our survey of couples seem to support this. (Videos are great for those people who could not attend the event).  It is for this reason we offer you 1/2 off of our Fully Matted Album on selected packages.

Pictures on the other hand can be put in frames and displayed though out your house and at work.  All of our in house printed pictures are printed with Archival Quality (meaning it will last at least 75 years exposed in Direct Sun light will not begin to fade).  Store these in a Custom Album and they will last much, much longer.  I have witnessed people who bought low cost photography services, only to see these memories fade away in under 7 years.     The old saying “It pays to buy Quality” sure applies here.

Fully Matted 8×10 Album

This is a beautifully bound Album with between 12 or 18 pages in it (24 to 36 prints).  All mattes are fixed size of 8×10.  We custom print images that display better at different crops so that they can be placed in this Album.  Make no mistake.  This is not your $20 Walmart special, but rather a beautiful looking Wedding Album to store your 8×10 images in.  All of these images are printed on Epson’s Luster Finish paper with Epson Inks for the highest color gamut and archival quality durability.

Custom Matted Album

This is another standard type of matted Wedding Album but this time with custom inserts for your 8×10, 5×7′s, 4×5′s, ovals or others. It is a beautiful album and can now contain different image sizes.

We also can design a fully digital matted album that is then custom bound with a bonded leather cover.

Photographic Art Album

For us, this is the best way to present and store you Wedding Images.  You are now not limited to any prefixed sizes.  In fact, because the album is a Lay-Flat album, your 10×10 or 12×12 pages become Huge- double in size allowing a full 12×24 in spread (we call this a double page spread).  Artistic layout here is extremely important and Irene is a master at image layout (no pun intended).  All kinds of things can be designed into this Album from different backgrounds, to repeating patterns, to black & white, closeups, etc.  We take each double page layout and have it tell it’s story of your wedding day.  One couple for example, went to the trouble of painting and posting sign markers to the church and reception for their guests.  You would normally never want to select this print but put in a designed album, it is an important memory of this special day as are signs on the limo, etc.

But we are not finished yet.  In our Wedding Information Page, we talk about the 4 elements that make an image great.  The 4th Element here is Photoshop.  Every images is inspected and enhanced in PS to make it look awesome.  This of course takes lots of time on our part.  Our pricing is currently at 1/3 of that of some studios and our image quality meets or exceeds most other studios meaning that you are getting great value for your investment.

Custom Image Processing and Enhancements on Every Image!

One element not mentioned is group shots.  Ever seen a photograph taken with a wide angle lens where the lens distorts the size and shape of all people at the outer edge of the image?  This is called Volume Anamorphosis. There are also a number of other lens corrections that need to be applied to images.  We correct for the 6 or more common lens distortions that occur even with the best of equipment used.

We process all of our images in a special raw processor that sharpens and also corrects these lens distortions.  It can take over a day on our Raptor quad core i-7 computer to process all of your images and we have one of the best computer currently available.  It also does a lot more to make your images look their best.  We know that top professional photographers use this software, but we do not know of anyone else in this area using it. They don’t even know about it.  I will blog about it in the up and coming weeks.  You just might call this our 6th Element in creating a great photographic.

But let us not forget the 4th Element, Photoshop.  Every top photographer today uses some type of image processor.  I say top as many people will try to do less hoping you don’t notice or some times one can miss something.  Our images have my name on it so I want to make sure it looks it’s best.  We try to make the image look good in the camera. That is the rule in professional photography.  The fact is that today you must use and apply many different Photoshop processing and enhancements to wow the crowd (and even yourself).  I consider it like an artist painting a picture.  He should never think how long it is taking to produce the work and what he is going to get paid for it.  You might call me a poor business person, so be it.  If I know that you really want this image and to make it look awesome I have to work on it pixel by pixel for two hours so be it.  In some cases we can charge for these enhancements but not in the majority of cases.  We want to give you memories that you are proud of and of course will tell all of your friends about us.  That is how we get paid in the long run.

November to March Sale

Don’t forget that between November 2011 and March of 2012 we offer a 10% discount on selected packages over $1500.

We are very pleased to announce the introduction of our new product:

Photographic Art Albums

These are sure to be a welcome offering for the bride and groom that want all or most of their outstanding photographic records in one place designed to tell the story of your wedding day. The albums normally have between 150-250 images on 30-50 double pages. Some customers have ordered as many as 600 images of their wedding.  There is no limit on how many images that you can order.  You will just get more volumes to hold all of your memories.  I have heard many times how pleased our customers are when they review the images and they sit back and just smile at how many great images that they have.

Irene is the Creative Director of the Wedding Album Department and has been working hard putting her creative thinking to work. We have specialized software specifically for this purpose and all of our staff contribute to the final design of the Album.

Albums are produced by one of the Premier Photographic Labs in the country and are hard bound with 3 different types of covers, including a bonded leather cover. These are lay-flat albums and show off you wedding pictures to a maximum size of 12×24 inches. It normally takes at least 2 weeks to prepare each album in house. All images are carefully processed in Photoshop applying our various styling techniques.  Photoshop is a must have 4th element in our image design process.  The 5th Element is our Photographic Art Album.  For more information on this, please see our Wedding Package Information Page.

Arrange a visit to view this exciting new product at your earliest convenience.  These albums are found in our Diamond and Platinum Wedding Packages.  We have had this project on our do list for quite some time and are very pleased to be able to present it to our customers.  Irene has been doing custom  designed collages for the past several year and really shines with her creative lay outs.  These Photographic Art Albums are just an extension of this excellent work that Irene has produced in the past but this time presented in a large top quality album all to its own.

As a side note, we also carry multiple types of matted albums and can also do a custom designed digital album for you.

We will be posting events and specials on a weekly basis. Drop by to review some photography tips and submit any questions that you might have also.