For Krissy

A few days ago Krissy asked a photography question:

"How do you take great night pictures? I will be doing some photography for a wedding in two weeks and the bride would like an outdoor picture of herself with Cincinnati in the back ground, at night."

My first suggestion was to have them stand really still and take a long exposure (like maybe 5 seconds). People used to have to hold still for much longer times in the early days of photography, but to keep the subject still they would use a clamp on their head - I recommend you don't try that with the bride. Anyway, I think the long exposure would look the most natural, maybe with a little bit of a bounced flash (probably using either the slow-sync or the rear-sync modes) to make her stand out.

That's a tricky shot though, and may be tough to pull off when you're under the gun. If the person moves at all or even blinks, the shot will be blurry. As a backup method, I recommended shooting two pictures and Photoshopping them together. After I suggested this, I wondered how it would work in real life, so I gave it a try. Here's a recap of what I did in my test. While not a full-blown tutorial, it should give you an idea of how to recreate the effect.

Below is a picture I took of myself (using the Nikon ML-L3 remote) a few nights ago while I was out getting groceries. Clicking on any of the photos to see it full-size. (apparently when I'm doing photography tests my mouth hangs open)

Flash Used: Yes - Nikon SB-400 (Auto, return light not detected)
Focal Length: 18.0mm (35mm equivalent: 27mm)
Exposure Time: 0.0050 s (1/200)
Aperture: f/3.5
ISO equiv: 900
White Balance: Auto
Exposure: shutter priority (semi-auto)

Yeah, it's pretty awful lighting, but I didn't want to spend too much time on this so it will have to do. The NKU campus is behind me, but because I used a flash to light myself up the background falls off almost completely into the blacks.

I then took a long-exposure (5 sec) background plate, in which you can actually see the campus in the background and even some texture in the sky.

Flash Used: No
Focal Length: 18.0mm (35mm equivalent: 27mm)
Exposure Time: 5.000 s
Aperture: f/7.1
ISO equiv: 200
White Balance: Auto
Exposure: shutter priority (semi-auto)

I dropped both layers in Photoshop (I wasn't using a tripod, so I had to align them a little) . I added a layer mask (Layer > Layer Mask > Reveal All) to the layer of me, and used the paintbrush to paint the mask you see below:

The initial result is pretty bad because of the difference in lighting:

I did a little color correction to my layer to match the look of the background, although if I had spent a little more time lighting myself better this may not have been necessary. While I'm at it let's close my mouth a little:

And finally I'll blend in a little of my layer back into the foreground to make the difference in lighting a little more gradual and make the picture a little more believable:


If I had to do this again and wanted to make it look nice, here's what I'd do different:

• Use a tripod.
  
• Take several shots with the person in the frame at several speeds, maybe 5 sec, 3 sec, 1 sec, 1/10 sec & 1/60 sec. In each of these make sure the aperture is open all the way.
• On the shorter exposures I'd use a flash bounced off a white card, and on the longer exposures I'd either rear-sync bounce flash or use some constant lighting source. That would give me several options, and I'd pick the longest exposure that wasn't blurry (from the person moving).

Let me know if you try this, or if you have any alternative methods. I'd love to see your results.

Backing Up

All three of my regular readers here use Blogger for their own blogs, so you might not be aware about the recent JournalSpace fiasco. Basically the folks at JournalSpace had a rather lousy backup procedure and lost all their users' data. Rather than trying to recover from this, they are simply shutting their doors (probably a wise move) and thousands of users are left without a trace of their blog.. Now I don't want to sound like your mom, but it might be a good time to learn from the misfortune of others and backup your own blog. I trust the integrity of the data I have stored with Google, but you just never know.

Fortunately making a backup of your Blogger blog is a pretty simple process. The first step is to export your blog itself. From your Blogger dashboard click on Settings which will automatically put you on the Basic settings tab. The first item on that page is Blog Tools and you will see three options: Import Blog - Export Blog - Delete Blog. Click on Export Blog. It may take a minute for this request to process, but after it does you will see a page with a button that says Download Blog. Click on that button ans save the file to you hard drive. The file it saves will be an XML file, and if you try to open it you'll just see a bunch of code, so the only way to use this file is to import it into Blogger should something ever happen to your blog. You may want to consider doing this every month or so.

The process above backs up all your posts and comments, but not your pictures. To back up your pictures you must have Picasa installed. Fortunately for you Mac users out there Picasa recently became available for OSX. After you have Picasa installed, make sure you're signed in to Blogger and then go to your Picasa Web Album. You may not have even known that you had one, but if you have a Blogger blog then you do. You should see an album with the name of your blog (it will have the little Blogger icon by it too). Click on the album and you'll see all the pictures you've ever posted to your blog. Above the pictures click on Download, then Download to Picasa.

That's it! Now you have all the elements of your blog saved to your computer. Hopefully you'll never need to use them, but it's nice to know you have everything just in case.

Private Blogging

A couple of you out there have recently made your blogs private due to concerns about perverts finding your blog and leaving inappropriate comments about your kids. While making your blog private (viewable by invitation only) is the most fool-proof method of keeping the creeps out, I just wanted to let everyone know (in case you didn't already know) about a few things you can do to increase the security of your blog without making it completely private. (This applies to Blogger blogs only, but most other blogging products should have similar functionality)

After logging into your blog, go to "Settings", which should put you on the default sub-section of "Basic". The fourth entry down is "Add your blog to our listings?" Make sure it is set to No. Right under that is "Let search engines find your blog?" Make sure that is set to No also. Be sure to click on "Save Settings".

These steps don't actually prevent anyone from seeing your blog, they just make it so that your blog is not being listed in the search engines, which is the way that creeps find stuff 99% of the time. This will also keep harmless people from finding your blog, but that's the trade off you make. Happy blogging!