Photography sessions

I have been taking private photography sessions for several months now. Mark Metternich is the man who is teaching me. http://www.towardsthelightphotography.com/ Mark is an extremely talented landscape photographer. He has done every type of photography in his life and it is a thrill getting to learn one on one with him.

I wanted to document a few of the things he has been teaching me. This of course is going to be just a simple over view, there is just no way I could tell everything here.

To start: The canon 40D which is the camera I own, is a great camera but I really need to upgrade my camera if I want to do more professional work. Here is why: The canon 40D was designed to get people into the pro camera category who couldn't or other wise wouldn't invest in one of the higher priced cameras. To do this they scaled down the sensor. So my camera is not a full sensor camera. What does this mean? Ugg, lets see if I can explain with out drawing a picture (since I don't know how to draw a picture on the computer.)Inside my camera is a sensor, this is where the image is captured. Well sensors are extremely expensive to make and thats why pro cameras are so expensive. Picture a square that is one inch by one inch (not the actual dimension)and lets say this is the full screen sensor. Well in my camera they cropped that one inch square down and now its maybe half the size. So no matter how great my picture is it will never be able to be blown up to make great big beautiful prints. My size sensor is only good for maybe an eight by ten at best with out effecting the quality. They call this the 1.6 crop factor. This also effects my lenses. SO if I have a lens that is 50MM lens it is in fact not really functioning as a 50 mm lens but rather smaller. Ugg, I barely understand all this, so its weird trying to explain it on here. But hopefully you sort of get what I am saying...need pro camera, in order to print off pro pictures.

Ah, here is a link to a site the better describes this: http://digital-photography-school.com/crop-factor-explained

Here is the other thing I learned first hand after printing off a picture we worked for hours on. My 40D which is a rather expensive camera has 12 mega pixels. Well 12 sounded good at first. But once you start learning to use photo shop and learn how to work in the digital dark room, you start to see that 12 mp is not high enough.

I took this adorable picture of Thomas and when we started working with it in photo shop, we decided to crop the picture. We zoomed in on Thomas and lost a bit of the back ground. I had no idea that as you zoom in you start losing mega pixels. So now my picture went from 12 MP's to 2 MP's. It still looked great on the computer as we worked on the white balance and saturation, but once it was printed off and blown up to a 16x20 you can see all the little squares that make up the mega pixels. Looks not so hot now. This is really what made me decide I need a professional camera. The camera that I want is the Canon 5D Mark II this is a full frame camera and has 21 MP. The cost is higher but if I want to get to the point were I am able to sell my images they are going to need to be able to be blown up and not show mega pixels. Most brides, teens who are having senior portraits made and family's who are having pictures made are going to want bigger pictures printed out.

I also purchased a new lens called a prime lens. This lens is not telescopic it is a fixed lens. This lens allows you to go very low on the F stop, which in turn blurs out the background. That is how F stops work. Low numbers mean the back ground is blurry, and the image you are focused on is the only thing sharp. High numbers on the F stop mean that everything will be in focus, the whole picture will appear clear. So if you want to photograph landscapes then you would want to shoot with the highest F stop on your camera, you will also need a tri pod for this because it will take your camera several minutes to take one shot. If how ever you are taken a portrait then you would want to choose the lowest F stop,the camera will shoot the picture VERY fast and the face will be sharp and the back ground blurry. F stops in between the high and low numbers can be played with in order to reach some middle ground. But if you aren't shooting in a high number or low number just keep your cameras F stop feature set to manual and it will give you the middle ground, with out any work from you. Make sense, or did I just really confuse you?

Also a fun trick with F stops would be to set it to the highest number, put your camera on a tripod and set it near a busy street at night. This is how they make pictures where all you see are streams of light, rather then cars. Pretty cool!

The other BIG thing if you are thinking of going professional is that you MUST start shooting your pictures in RAW. I had never even heard of RAW before I started my private sessions. But RAW is your negative in the digital camera. Think back to old school 35 mm cameras. When you get your pictures developed they take the images from your negatives. If you have ever been in a dark room then you know there is a ton of work you can do to an image off the negative. You can work on the white balance, the saturation and so on. In other words, you have total control to make sure the image turns out just the way you saw it in the real world. Well if you aren't shooting digitally in RAW then you are stuck with your cameras interpretation of what all that should look like. Sure you can toy around with it in Photo Shop but you will never be able to fully work the picture the way you should be able to.

There are two aspects to Photo Shop, one is just plain old photo shop and the other is what is called the digital dark room. This is what separates the good photographers from the professional photographers. So it is imperative that you change the settings on your camera from JPEG mode to RAW or at least RAW/JPEG. I have mine set to RAW/JPEG since I like to email my pictures and currently don't own Photo Shop. But like Mark explained to me, once you shoot a picture if it isn't shot in RAW you can never switch it back. So its good for me to have it set to both.

I have learned so much that I could go on and on but I will stop for now, before my little brain pops! PS. If you are reading this and know more then me (which is probably a lot of you) feel free to correct me if I have mis spoken.

Summery: Shoot in RAW, learn Photo Shop / Digital Dark Room and look for a used (if you cant afford new) full frame sensor like the Canon 5D Mark II