Wedding at Blue Point Jimbaran Hill, Bali island

9 Tips of Night shoot photography

Here are 9 the tips of taking a photos in the dark.

1. Taking photos after sunset (Twilight zone)
Twilight is the time before sunrise, or after sunset, when sunlight scattered in the upper atmosphere illuminates the lower atmosphere, and the surface of the Earth is between light and dark. Dawn is the time before sunrise. It is recognized by the presence of weak sunlight, while the sun itself is still below the horizon. Dusk is the time after the sunset, the amount of light still available during twilight zone allows a faster shutter speed to create short motion blurs.
The best time of taking photos after sunset is during the dusk. The sky isn’t completely black but the blue color of sky is great and still show more details in the distance with the faster shutter speed.

2. Keep it Steady will reduce blurry and camera shaking
With minimum light at night, it will requires slow shutter speed. To shoot bright pictures without the blur at night, use a tripod or monopod to keep your camera steady.
When using a tripod or monopod you can use three technic:
a. Cable release, A cable release allows you to fire the shutter without having to touch the camera body (and tripod).
b. Mirror lockup, enable your cameras mirror lockup setting and gently press the shutter. Check your user manual for details of where this option is and how it works. (On my Canon, it’s under the “Custom Functions” menu).
c. Self timer, this will let you press the shutter release button and let the camera settle before taking the picture. Most cameras default to 10 second timer.
If you don’t have a tripod or monopod with you, find some support objects to keep your body and arms stable. For example, you can lean on a wall or place your elbows on a table to keep your arms steady. If there’s nothing to help keep you steady, stand with your legs far apart from each other and hold your breath while taking the picture.

3. Use Higher ISO but it will make noisey photo
Some time noisey photos more better than blurry photos, because you can reduce noise with image editing software but you can’t remove blur. Use a higher ISO will give more brightness photos.

4. Use larger lens aperture or F-number smaller
The aperture range of a lens refers to the amount that the lens can open up or close down to let in more or less light, respectively. Apertures are listed in terms of f-numbers, which quantitatively describe relative light-gathering area. Lenses with larger apertures are also described as being “faster,” because for a given ISO speed, the shutter speed can be made faster for the same exposure.
Additionally, a smaller aperture means that objects can be in focus over a wider range of distance, a concept also termed the depth of field.
For example, lens aperture f/1.0 is better in the night shoot than lens aperture f/2.8

5. Make a Motion Blur photos

Jakarta at Night
Originally uploaded by a Journey Beyond.

Some time blurry photos are not bad like a motion blur, it can add some interest of your photos. When shooting a moving objects, or deliberatly move your camera (panning technic) to create a motion blur. Zooming in while the shutter is still open will also add an interesting forward-motion effect (zooming blur).

6. Use Bulb Mode
Ever see “bulb” flash on your camera as you crank the dial to increase exposure time? Bulb mode is when your shutter stays open for as long as you hold down the shutter release. Most cameras will top out at a 30 second exposure. Bulb mode combined with a locking cable release allows you to keep the shutter open for as long as you want.

7. Use Flash or additional light
By using flash or additional light like continuous light is the usual technic to shoot in the dark. The combination of flash and long exposure will give you good photos at night. The flash will freeze the foreground and the long exposure will reveal the background.
When shooting the people, they always tend to move right after they see the flash, you need to set the shutter curtain sync to the second curtain (Usually in the custom functions settings). This will fire a flash just before the shutter closes instead of in the beginning. Using second curtain sync will also put people in front of any motion blur so nothing is covering their faces. Second curtain sync is available in most new digital SLR cameras but rarely seen in point and shoot cameras.

8. Create a High Dynamic Range (HDR) photos with auto exposure bracketing

London Night View from NFT HDR
Originally uploaded by vladatzar.

When using auto exposure bracketing (AEB) technic on camera, place your camera on a tripod for steady state and shoot three exposures, one darker, one lighter, and one just in the middle.
Then load the images into HDR image editor like Photoshop or Photomatix and create HDR file out of the three exposures. After create a HDR image, you can apply tone mapping to to reveal more details. With a tone mapped night photos, it can give results similar to shooting during twilight with more post-processing control.

9. Use continuous shoot and Stack

Sometimes when you shoot long exposures, noise and hot pixels will appear even at the lowest ISO setting.
To overcome this problem, shoot the same photo a few times (more is better) with continuous shoot, and use Photoshop CS3 image stacking to combine the analyze the image to remove noise and hotpixels.
After open Photoshop CS3, follow this instruction :
1. Open the File> Scripts menu and choose Load files into Stack
2. Click the Browse button and load all the images.
3. Checkmark the “Create Smart Oject after Loading Layers” and click OK.
4. Open the Layers> Smart Objects> Stack Mode menu and choose Median.

10 Tips how to make a better photo

This tips is a basically tips, i want to share it and hope it would be a good tips for beginner.

1. Get closer to your object and down on their level

2. Learn to use contrasts between colors with using a plain background

3. Use flash or continuous light in outdoor

4. Lock the focus, use tripod if necessary

5. Try different way of your picture, with vertical or horizontal picture

6. Move the point of interest away from the “dead center”. See another Short and Simple composition tips

7. Watch the available light

8. Use all your available space in your photo

9. Always use continuous shots

10. Know your camera and all your lens characteristic

Edit your RAW Image using Adobe Bridge

You will not find them in the CS3 program you thought you bought

First time, Adobe Bridge was just a glorified file browser and Camera Raw a neat alternative to the RAW processing software that came with your camera. But, now if you have Photoshop CS3 and you don’t delve into these programs added, you’re wasting your top-dollar investment.

I have some favorites RAW image editing tips using Camera Raw on Adobe Bridge. It’s so good and you may not even need to open Photoshop. Some of this great stuff wasn’t here when CS3 first launched, so before you start, go to Help > Updates to ensure you have the latest versions.

Adobe Bridge also can copying your images from your memory card into individual folders, and back them up while it’s at it: go to File > Get Photos From Camera.

Here are some of my favorites tips on Camera RAW Adobe Bridge:

Clarity slider in Basic panel Find the new Clarity slider on the Basic panel, and crank it up. Essentially, it adds midtone contrast to make your image pop all the more.

Sharpening in RAW Your best bet used to be to sharpen in Photoshop. Now, with Camera Raw’s excellent sliders, and the fact that the sharpening is done to the luminance data (essentially helping you avoid sharpening noise), you may want to use Camera Raw’s sharpening tool on your JPEGs and TIFFs, too.

Click on the Detail tab (symbolized by two small triangles). Then, to harness the full power of sharpening, zoom in to 100% or more.

The Alt key on a PC or (the Option key on a Mac) is your best friend when you’re using all of these sliders. Hold it down when you move the Amount slider to hide the color and see what happens to your luminance data as it gets sharpened.

As with Photoshop’s Smart Sharpen and Unsharp Mask tools, the higher the radius, the more pixels on either side of an edge get sharpened. Hold down Alt (Option) to see that effect in action.

Similarly, hold down Alt (Option) to see what happens when you move the new Detail slider left to prevent haloes, or move the new Masking slider back and forth to determine how much detail within the edges gets sharpened. (The screengrab shows Masking at work.)

Healing in Raw Sometime we probably have a little dust on our camera sensor or lens. Without Photoshop, we can fix it on RAW image. Grab the Retouch tool from the toolbar at the top of the screen, and click on your bad spot to surround it with the red circle. Use the Radius slider to make sure it is encompassed. Then find a good area and drag the tethered green circle over a patch that Camera Raw can use to heal your dust spot. Of course, this works on blemishes, too. And, if need be, you can switch the function type to "Clone."

Zoom and Compare in Bridge One of the most frustrating tasks in the old Bridge was trying to compare two images. But now you can select and compare as many as you want just by holding down Shift and clicking the first and last of a set with your mouse. Or, to select a few at a time, click on them while holding down Control (Command on a Mac). Then, to examine a detail for sharpness or facial expression, click on one or all of the images to bring up the magnifier.

Stack them into a group In order to avoid an enormously crowded Bridge window, pile all of those shots into a stack. Just select them and go to Stacks > Group as Stack.

Once they’re stacked, a small number will show up in the upper-left corner of the stack telling you how many are present. Click it to show or hide the group. Then, to see them all in the Preview window, click the edge of the bottom image in the pile. To see only the front one, click the bottom of the pile again.

Buy Adobe Photoshop CS3 complete with Adobe bridge or Adobe Creative Suite CS3 Design Standard full with tutorial

Remove the crowd from your picture

Sometime we have the problem with the crowd in our beautiful shots that have been ruined by tourists cluttering the composition. It’s not always possible to wait for everyone to leave to take your shot, so luckily there are a lot of options to remove tourists once you get home:

Here are some tips to remove the crowd that cluttering the composition of your pictures:

• Microsoft Research’s Group Shot allows you to choose the favorite parts of each image in a series of shots and composite them together to create a single shot.
• Futurelabs Tourist Remover does something similar but in a more automated fashion, allowing you to choose as many images as you want to blend together, its best for images with relatively sparse crowds as it needs a significant portion of the background visible.
• DSPhotographic walks you through the process using the masking, layers and eraser tool in Photoshop.
• Using image stacks in Photoshop CS3 by photonews or popphoto

So, never fear of the crowd that ruin your beautiful object. Just shot, and shot, and shot. Then remove it at home.

Have a nice try!

Simple mystical effect on your photo

Last week, one of my friend asking me how to create the mystical effects to one of my picture. Now, i want to share this simple tutorial in Photoshop.
I hope this could be your refferences when editing your pictures. Some of this text will be translate in Indonesian language to help my friend from Indonesia to read it

Step 1.
Fix your original photo histogram by using image adjustment level and curve
(Perbaiki histogram foto dengan adjustment level dan curve)

Step 2.
Use Unsharp Mask tools to more sharpen your photo, if your photo not to sharp.
In this photo, i used the amount 100 and radius 1px
(Gunakan filter-sharpen, unsharp mask untuk mempertajam foto apabila kurang tajam, dengan amount 100 dan radius 1px)

Step 3.
Create duplicate layer from background and rename as cloud, then use filter-render-clouds to create smoke effect to the photo
(Gunakan filter-render-clouds untuk memberikan efek asap pada foto)

Step 4.
Coloring the smoke with yellow to give warm effect to the smoke, I used color balance on image adjustment on this step
(Buat warna asap yang agak kekuningan dengan mengubah color balances ini untuk membuat suasana hangat dalam kabut)

Step 5.
Change the Cloud layer Opacity to 81% and Fill to 51%
(Ubah opacity layer cloud menjadi 81% dan fill nya menjadi 51%)

Step 6.
Use your creativity in deleting some smoke area on your photo
(Hapus asap pada beberapa bagian foto sesuai kreasi anda)

Step 7.
Create enother duplicate layer from background and name it Blur. Then use filter-blur-gaussian blur with 50px
(Duplicate lagi layer background dan beri nama blur, lakukanlah filter-blur-gaussian blur dengan 50px)

Step 8.
Change the blending option of Blur layer to Hard light. This will give more contrast light to your photo
(Kemudian ubah blending layernya menjadi Hard light untuk menambahkan kontras cahaya pada foto anda)

Finish

Cropping With Style

Before we will take a picture, we usually have arranged the matters of our camera like shutter speed, aperture, lens, white balance and also the object that we will shoot. But, even we already set the all things from camera, and while after we push the shutter button, we still get something that might be not perfect in the picture, for example a part of the object is not perfectly composed, or there is something bothering from background, etc.

What we see from the view finder of camera generally unlike the result of the photo after we push the shutter button. So, we need the editor application to repair and improve our photo.

Cropping technic is one of way to repair the composition of your photo, but don’t make it a habit in photography.

Be careful in close up photography or short distance object. When you crop the close up photo, still remain to well-balanced your photo. Tight Crop may be use in close up object, but don’t make your photo oppressed by its frame, remain its balanced.

When repairing the composition of your photo by cropping technic, you can place the object stronger, and become a point of interest that will focus people eyes in your photo. Things which less proporsional and bother the point of interest in your photo, can be crop to focus the main object of your photo.

Rule of thirds or triangle formula can be use in cropping your photo. But sometimes, we can also make something different from the rule of composition. Don’t affraid to come up difference. Do with your own style!

Create a Natural HDR Image using Photomatix

Software tools that we need:
- RAW editor such as Digital Photo Professional from Canon, Capture NX from Nikon, Camera RAW, Aperture, RawShooter, or Photoshop.
- HDR software, for this tutorial I use Photomatix.

Step 1: Source images
To create HDR images, we need more than one image file to combine in HDR 32 bit format. Usually, I use three images to generate the HDR image with a different exposure for each source images.

There are two main ways to create the source images needed for HDR. You can either use AEB (auto exposure bracketing), on your camera to take 3 images automatically or you can use single RAW image and use a RAW editor to produce 3 shots back at your computer.
This tutorial will show you how to create HDR image with auto exposure bracketing.

Auto Exposure Bracketing (AEB)

The main advantage with AEB is that you can get better source images with less noise. For example, a sunset. You would normally get really dark shadows and enhancing them later from 1 single RAW file would increase the noise.

With AEB you can take a completely seperate image for the shadows and one for the highlights to preseve the detail and keep the noise to a minimum. The disadvantge to this approach is that anything moving in the image will become blurred and repeated as it moves across the 3 images. To start with you will need a camera that has the AEB mode and a tripod. You will also need a tripod so that the 3 shots you take can be perfectly aligned later.

Go to the menu on your camera and set the AEB mode to -2 0 +2 stops. (I usually set this exposure). Compose your shot, and set the camera up as your normally would to take a picture. Now after you take a picture you will see the exposure compensation level drop down to -2. Take another picture and you will see it goes up to +2. You will notice the shutter speed or aperture changes too. This allows you to get the three shots for the shadows, a balanced image and for the highlights. You now have the 3 shots required to produce a HDR image.

Step 2: Generating a HDR image
Now, open your Photomatix software, and from the HDR menu select “Generate” then “browse” to open 3 source images and click “ok”.

Because you are using 3 source images with AEB, Photomatix will detect the exposure for each image. And now you need to choose the option for merging the source images to HDR. Let Photomatix aligns the images for you. Or you can check the “Attempt to reduce ghosting artifact”, this is to reduce the moving object in your images from ghosting effect.

Click ok and after a few minutes you will see your HDR image. It won’t look exactly right just yet. Some areas will be slightly over-exposed and it’ll look odd.

Step 3: Tone Mapping
Tone mapping is the magic part of the HDR image. It will convert your HDR image into something usable from 32 bit mode into 16 bit or 8 bit mode. Go to the HDR menu and select Tone Mapping. And select “Details Enhancer”, good technique in HDR tone mapping.

You will see how your photo looks more like a standard HDR image. The sky will be nicely exposed, as will the ground. The trick now is to adjust the settings to get a nice balanced image. You could be creative and go for something a little more fun if you feel like it. For the image in this guide I wanted something special and yet not too far from the real world. I’ll start with a quick run down of the various options.

Luminosity:
Adjusts the brightness of the shadows. Moving the slider to the right has the effect of boosting shadow details and brightening the image. Moving it to the left gives a more natural look to the tone mapped image. The optimal value depends on the image and the effect you want to achieve.

Strength:
Controls the strength of local contrast enhancements. A value of 100% gives the maximum increase in local contrast.
The optimal value depends on the image and the effect you want to achieve.

Color Saturation:
Controls the saturation of the RGB color channels. The greater the saturation, the more intense the color. The value affects each color channel equally.

White Clip - Black Clip:
From watching the way the histogram changes, the white clip adjusts the highlight contrast and the black clip adjusts the shadow contrast.

Micro-smoothing:
Basically this setting should be called “How arty do you want your shot?” At 0 you can get the cool arty style HDR images with all the detail in everything from walls to clouds you didn’t know where there.

However, if you want a nice simple blended exposure photo set it to 30. 95% of the image should be perfectly exposed as if you spent hours putting them together in Photoshop. This is a great new addition to Photomatix as it allows people to use the software as they see fit.
If they want a nice photo that is perfectly exposed then they can get that just as if they used ND Gradient filters on their lens. However, if like me they want something a bit more unique they can drop the micro-smoothing down and get something dramatic.

Light smoothing:
Never set this below 0 as you will get horrible results.

Microcontrast:
Controls the accentuation of local details. The default value (High) is the optimal value in most cases. However, this control may be useful in the case of a noisy image or when the accentuation of local details is not desirable (e.g. seams of a stitched pano in a uniform area may become visible when local details are too much enhanced).

As you can see, when you increase the strength, luminosity and clipping you increase the visible detail in the image. You can see more detail in the building and the clouds.

Three figures above, was setting with different value of Tone Mapping variables. Being creative with your own style! Choose the best tone mapping for your image. Remember, every image will can not be set with the same value.

Step 4: Final Touch
Now, after you create the HDR image with Tone Mapping, you can select the 16bit output to get the better detail on your image. And save it in TIFF image again.

The final touch is using Photoshop. You will need a little bit adjustment in Photoshop like adjust the level, curve, shadow/highlight, color balance (if needed), saturation (depend on your image) and sharpness tools to get more sharpness from HDR image.
When adjusting your image in Photoshop, remember to see your image histogram. Choose a good histogram from your image.

Issues
- Halo effects around buildings and people can occur too. I’ve read that this can be due to lowering the luminosity below 0.
- Don’t even think about ISO800 or 1600 unless you are desperate and have a great noise reduction technique. Use between ISO100 and 400 to reduce noise effect.

High Dynamic Range images or HDRI

History
HDRI was originally developed for use with purely computer-generated images. Later, methods were developed to produce a high dynamic range image from a set of photographs taken with a range of exposures. With the rising popularity of digital cameras and easy-to-use desktop software, the term “HDR” is now popularly used to refer to the process of tone mapping together with bracketed exposures of normal digital images, giving the end result a high, often exaggerated dynamic range. This composite technique is different from, and generally of lower quality than, the production of an image from a single exposure of a sensor that has a native high dynamic range. Tone mapping is also used to display HDR images on devices with a low native dynamic range, such as a computer screen.

One problem with HDR has always been in viewing the images. Mundane CRTs, LCDs, prints, and other methods of displaying images only have a limited dynamic range. Thus various methods of converting HDR images into a viewable format have been developed, generally called “tone mapping”.

Early methods of tone mapping were simple. They simply showed a “window” of the entire dynamic range, clipping to set minimum and maximum values. However, more recent methods have attempted to show more of the dynamic range. The more complex methods tap into research on how the human eye and visual cortex perceive a scene, trying to show the whole dynamic range while retaining realistic colour and contrast.

Dynamic Range
Dynamic range in photography describes the ratio between the maximum and minimum measurable light intensities (white and black, respectively). In the real world, one never encounters true white or black only varying degrees of light source intensity and subject reflectivity. Therefore the concept of dynamic range becomes more complicated, and depends on whether you are describing a capture device (such as a camera or scanner), a display device (such as a print or computer display), or the subject itself. High dynamic range (HDR) images enable photographers to record a greater range of tonal detail than a given camera could capture in a single photo. This opens up a whole new set of lighting possibilities which one might have previously avoided for purely technical reasons.

Conclusion :

The dynamic range is the ratio between the maximum and minimum values of a physical measurement. Its definition depends on what the dynamic range refers to.
- For a scene: ratio between the brightest and darkest parts of the scene.
- For a camera: ratio of saturation to noise. More specifically, ratio of the intensity that just saturates the camera to the intensity that just lifts the camera response one standard deviation above camera noise.
- For a display: ratio between the maximum and minimum intensities emitted from the screen.

HDR Images

The Dynamic Range of real-world scenes can be quite high ratios of 100,000:1 are common in the natural world. An HDR (High Dynamic Range) image stores pixel values that span the whole tonal range of real-world scenes. Therefore, an HDR image is encoded in a format that allows the largest range of values, e.g. floating-point values stored with 32 bits per color channel.

Another characteristics of an HDR image is that it stores linear values. This means that the value of a pixel from an HDR image is proportional to the amount of light measured by the camera. In this sense, HDR images are scene-referred, representing the original light values captured for the scene. Whether an image may be considered High or Low Dynamic Range depends on several factors. Most often, the distinction is made depending on the number of bits per color channel that the digitized image can hold. However, the number of bits itself may be a misleading indication of the real dynamic range that the image reproduces converting a Low Dynamic Range image to a higher bit depth does not change its dynamic range, of course.
· 8-bit images (i.e. 24 bits per pixel for a color image) are considered Low Dynamic Range.
· 16-bit images (i.e. 48 bits per pixel for a color image) resulting from RAW conversion are still considered Low Dynamic Range, even though the range of values they can encode is much higher than for 8-bit images (65536 versus 256). Converting a RAW file involves applying a tonal curve that compresses the dynamic range of the RAW data so that the converted image shows correctly on low dynamic range monitors. The need to adapt the output image file to the dynamic range of the display is the factor that dictates how much the dynamic range is compressed, not the output bit-depth. By using 16 instead of 8 bits, you will gain precision but you will not gain dynamic range.
· 32-bit images (i.e. 96 bits per pixel for a color image) are considered High Dynamic Range. Unlike 8- and 16-bit images which can take a finite number of values, 32-bit images are coded using floating point numbers, which means the values they can take is unlimited. It is important to note, though, that storing an image in a 32-bit HDR format is a necessary condition for an HDR image but not a sufficient one. When an image comes from a single capture with a standard camera, it will remain a Low Dynamic Range image, regardless of the format used to store it.
There are various formats available to store HDR images, such as Radiance RGBE (.hdr) and OpenEXR (.exr) among the most commonly used.

The new “merge to HDR” feature of Adobe Photoshop CS2 or latest allows the photographer to combine a series of bracketed exposures into a single image which encompasses the tonal detail of the entire series. There is no free lunch however; trying to broaden the tonal range will inevitably come at the expense of decreased contrast in some tones. Learning to use the merge to HDR feature in Photoshop CS2 can help you make the most of your dynamic range under tricky lighting while still balancing this trade off with contrast.

The other HDR softwares are Photomatix or FDR Tools

How do I shoot an HDR image
Most digital cameras are only able to capture a limited dynamic range (the exposure setting determines which part of the total dynamic range will be captured). This is why HDR images are commonly created from photos of the same scene taken under different exposure levels.
Here are some recommendations for taking different exposures for the HDR image:
1. Mount your camera on a tripod, this is recommended to reduce camera shaking
2. Set your camera to manual exposure mode. Select an appropriate aperture for your scene (e.g. f/8 or less if you need more depth of field) and the lowest ISO setting.
3. Measure the light in the brightest part of your scene (spot metering or in Av mode to point only the highlights) and note the exposure time. Do the same for the darkest shadows of your scene.
4. Determine the number and value of exposures necessary. For this, take as a basis the exposure time measured for the highlights. Multiply this number by 4 to find the next exposure with a stop spacing of 2 EV. Multiply by 4 successively for the next exposures till you pass the exposure measured for the shadows. (Note: For most daylight outdoor scenes excluding the sun, 3 exposures spaced by two EVs are often sufficient to properly cover the dynamic range).
5. You can make use of Auto-Exposure Bracketing if your camera supports it and if it allows a sufficient exposure increment and number of auto-bracketed frames to cover the dynamic range determined in step 4. Otherwise, you will have to vary the exposure times manually.

I would suggest only using HDR images when the scene’s brightness distribution can no longer be easily blended using a graduated neutral density (GND) filter. This is because GND filters extend dynamic range while still maintaining local contrast. Scenes which are ideally suited for GND filters are those with simple lighting geometries, such as the linear blend from dark to light encountered commonly in landscape photography (corresponding to the relatively dark land transitioning into bright sky).

Short and Simple of Composition Tips

1. Choose the right background for the object (point of interest the image)
Background is the important composition element of capturing the object. Even the great beautifull object will look bad if you choose the wrong background for it.

2. Make it simple
Good composition is how to presenting your message on your picture. Simplicity sometime is the best choice to show your message.

3. Do with your style
Every people can present the message with their own languange. Picture is the language of photographer. Do with your own style.

4. Be carefull when cropping your picture
Sometime crop the picture can ruin their composition. Be carefull when crop the human picture

5. Think the number
Odd number will make the better visual the even number. Like the triangle, its look more dynamic than the square. Three is the great number in composition.

6. Learn from other and motivate your self
Always learn from the expert and motivate your self will get great shoot.

7. Always try another one
Dont satisfy your self from one picture. Always try another one from another point of view.

8. Push, push and push your shutter again
Take a lot of pictures with different idea. You will never know, what will you got

9. Always go with your camera out there
You will never know what will you see out there. The moment will not happend twice.

Welcome note

Welcome to my photography blog

This site is created to save my favorite articles and my tips articles in photography or photo editing. I hope you will enjoy and like it as i did.

I was living in Bali Island of Indonesia and until now i only go around Bali island and shoot every beautiful moments and natures from my home island.

I hope my photography journey sharing will open your thought about bali island.

Thank you

Bali Photographer