naophoros Posts

2007-06-30

A friend just wrote and asked for a little advice on a cafe photo shoot. I thought this topic would be helpful for a wider audience:

A friend of mine is doing an intern sort of thing at a new cafe here. She called me up the other day and said the cafe wanted some pictures taken and asked if I could do it. So I said yes. It was just a quick call to see if I could do it, and she said she would call back later with more specifics. So, I’m assuming it’s photos of the food and/or the cafe itself.

Do you have any tips for doing a better job on this kind of photography? I’m already planning to take a backup (a Canon film SLR) just in case for some random reason they want a large print of something, or in case my Nikon D40 encounters troubles. Better safe than sorry, I always said. Anyways, just wanted to ask for tips, as I really want to do a great job on this!

It all depends on what they want and expect. Let’s look at it a minute.

2007-06-28

Adjusting your camera’s f/stop (aka aperture, f-stop) not only controls the amount of light entering the camera by opening and closing the hole through which the light. The choice of aperture also has another side effect: control of the depth of field, or the depth of the photograph that will be in focus.

I was taking a few photos while friends of mine worked on a project and realized later that I had accidentally taken excellent comparison examples of two different depths of field. So, I will put them up as a way to see more clearly how altering the f/stop changes photographs.

2007-06-24

A few days ago, my friend and I were looking at each others cameras and messing around with some of the features. It was actually quite fun comparing. I have the older Nikon D100, a 6 megapixel camera. He has a newer Canon EOS 350D (same thing as the Rebel XT, for some confusing marketing reason), a slightly larger 8 megapixel camera.

So, they are not really intended to be compared. Mine was a higher line (in its day) and his is the entry level digital SLR for Canon. Yet, I wanted to see how they differed and what had improved in digital cameras in the three year period between the release of our two cameras.

2007-06-22

I received another photo from a friend to evaluate here. Here are his comments on his photo:

This was a 9 second exposure using my tripod. I was originally intending to get the cars on the outside road shooting from inside my complex, but when I saw a car coming down the driveway from inside our complex I quickly hit the shutter release. I was using a wider aperture so as to get stuff in the background more in focus, and in that sense it worked although do you think it would have been better if I had left it out of focus? Anyways, I really liked the way the taillights have a sweeping fiery pattern.

2007-06-20

I enjoy reading the musings of Herbert Keppler on his “Speaking Frankly” blog on the Popular Photography website. He often posts his notes and writings from days gone past, and it is interesting to see his perspective today and yesterday, comparing photography now and then. In some ways, we feel everything has changed, yet in other ways, it is just the same discipline with new tools.

He dug out one such comment from his 1969 “Keppler Files” which speaks about the automation of cameras: