Our Photography Courses Blog - Photography Tips and Techniques

When you move from the automatic/vari-program side of the camera to the clever side, with all the P A S M or P Av Tv and M modes you have to make a few decisions. You need to be on top of the ISO, white balance, autofocus mode etc. to get the picture that you want.

One of the things that people forget is that on the clever side of the dial you have the ability to add flash even when the camera wouldn’t have done it automatically. We often find that by the time people come on a course they are so fed up with the flash popping up willy-nilly that they turn it off more or less permanently.

This is a shame, because certain subjects which are back lit could really do with a little flash. This statuary at Ashton Court in Bristol for example:

Using “fill” flash or “force” flash in this way can make a picture look more natural, weirdly enough. Even more weirdly, the brighter the say, the more fill flash you might need!

Sometimes it can look a little glary, but nearly all cameras will allow you to set “flash exposure compensation” – in other words to turn up or down the power of the flash. It may be tricky to find (look in the flash control section of a canon camera), but it’s worth it. You rarely want to turn the flash up – nearly always you end up turning it down a stop or two.

“Flash exposure compensation” is changing the power of the flash. “Exposure compensation” makes the picture brighter or darker. You can use the two together – for example to make the picture dark with really stark flash for effect.

We’ve been asked quite a lot how to achieve a tilt shift effect – something we see around a lot these days – it has the effect of making landscape shots look like tiny toys:

Here’s an example of a station on the Severn Valley Railway, with the effect applied:

Highley station looking like a toy

This effect is made by making the landscape scene look like a portrait setting – by blurring lots of the image artificially in post production. This has the effect of making it look like the sort of image you get with a tilt-shift lens, or more usually in a tiny subject.

Highley station as it really looks

Here’s the real image with no processing.

It’s extremely easy to do this in Lightroom by using the graduated filter set to minimum clarity and sharpness, then dragging it over the image so that there is a focal point where your eyes would have set. It works best of all on things we have no problem with imagining small – like train sets. Looking down on the scene from height also helps.

It’s a very easy effect – this took less than five minutes – there are much better people at this than us – here is an article with some fantastic examples. You do need to think about the shot when you take it if you are interested in doing this afterwards, or else go back through all your old pics looking for (usually rather dull) pictures in which a there is a clearly defined subject that you can make clear while everything else goes blurry.

Here’s another one – this time from Stourhead:

Tiny weeny Stourhead

And another from the tiny weeny Malvern Hills:

One of the problems when photographing flowers is that they are very reflective – it’s almost as if they were designed to reflect light or something!

WIth a dark background, sometimes your camera tends to brighten the image a little resulting in the pale flower being “blown”, or overexposed. We really need to tone the whole image down a bit to ensure that the flower can all be seen, after all the dark background is just background.

Helen's flower, on photography course at Charlecote

There are two ways to do this:

Firstly, you could set the metering to “center weighted” (sorry about the American spelling) – this kind of metering takes most of it’s reading from where you focused (not the middle if you half-pressed and moved) – 75% or so from a 25% area around the focus point. This means that the subject is more important than the background, which in this case it is.

Secondly, you could just use your +/- button to underexpose the whole thing, assuming you are in the clever P A S or P Av Tv modes. This will allow you to make the pic a bit too dark, which is fine.

Or you could do both – we usually use center-weighted and underexpose by .3 or .7 stops – we often photograph pale British people in underlit British rooms which can have the same blowing-out-the-pale subject effect. Under exposure is always better than over exposure (within reason) – as you can’t do anything with blown-out areas, there is literally no data there to work with.

Don’t forget, if you do this you’ll need to change it back afterwards!

We are going to discuss some tips to remember while placing online order of canvas prints. Canvas printing is great for preserving your photos and transforming traditional photos into vibrant canvases.
Who to Choose?
This is the first question arises when you think of transforming your memories from photo-to-canvas. It can be difficult to choose a canvas printing company in first glance but a deep study of company, customer reviews will help on finalizing whom to choose.
Once you shortlisted few names it’s important to check few things before you proceed.
How’s the company doing with other customers?

Reviews can help to avoid you falling in wrong choice. What is their primary service – like are they a canvas manufacturing company but printing canvas are their secondary services, in this case there’s a risk of quality loss and delay in delivery.
What is their turnaround time to get order delivered many of the companies’ promises next day delivery but they can fail to keep their promise. Imagine you getting your anniversary photos canvas print day after your anniversary, or your kids photograph after his birthday. Delay in delivery time or falling to keep delivery promises end up with great disappointment. This needs to be checked and it’s important.

Are you getting good value for money?
These are some of the things we usually ignore while deciding on any of the company to buy services but these are important and should be checked to avoid loss of time and money.
Correct Photo, Clear Subject and Correct Size.
Once you decide on the company who will print canvas for you than it’s your responsibility to provide them with correct details and photo to print. Many times its observed they will print the things as they have received they will make no correction let take an example how suppose you have a photo which a decade old and it has become dirty due to multiple handling and you decided to preserve those memories by converting it into nice and large canvas print which will be a masterpiece of your living room, falling to provide proper photo you’ll get the print which will be not up to the mark.So provide them with nice photo if you have photo which is damaged you can get it corrected from any of the professional photographer or even you can ask your canvas printing company to get it renovated before printing.
Secondly, we want to print photo which is of our birthday/anniversary from so and so year but we forget to mention exact details we wanted to be printed on our canvas. Hence results canvas photo with half details.
We sometimes forget to provide the exact size we need, but companies will not print any canvas until correct size and pricing options are provided. This can result in delays to get our print.
Companies who provide canvas photo printing services will always be there to help and provide best service but it’s also important that you provide them with proper details to maintain good business relations.