Light levels

1. Sunny day outdoors - 1/2000 sec
2. Hazy bright day - 1/1000 sec
3. Bright cloudy day without shadows - 1/500 sec
4. Overcast day - 1/250 sec
5. Heavily overcast - 1/125 sec
6. Deep shade (eg. woody area) - 1/60 sec
7. Before thunderstorm or heavily overcast - 1/30 sec
8. Brightly lit store interior - 1/15 sec
9. Well lit storage or sports arena - 1/8 sec
10. Well lit home interior - 1/4 sec

Photoshop tips

I recently started using photoshop. Selecting an object using the magic wand or the pen tool in order to be able to change the background is one of my least favorite tasks. I spent a week exploring this option and wondered to myself...do people really do this type of thing...when I came upon a tablet+pen tool. Enter...the Intuos3 professional pen tablet...one of the most easiest ways to edit and create digital artwork. Check it out at www.wacom.com. It's a cool one!

Panning

Whether it's your baby that's just learnt how to walk, a horse galloping along in a field or a car hurtling around a track - you can improve your chances of getting a sharp shot if you grasp a simple technique known as panning. The technique of panning involves moving your camera from left to right (or vice versa or top to bottom :-) following the subject. Depress the shutter and keep following the subject till it leaves the frame. This does require some practice and a few magic numbers :-)

So this is a 3 step process-
1. As subject approaches, track it smoothly with the camera
2. Do an automatic focus tracking i.e. half press the shutter button
3. Release shutter and continue to follow the subject

Eg. F1 car - recomended shutter speed 1/250
Running man - 1/60

For panning a tripod or a monopod is your best friend..Happy panning!

Fill flash

Have you ever looked at someone's outdoor vacation photographs and wondered who the subject was? The face was so dark you couldn't tell if it was your best friend. To flash or not to flash, that is the question.

How do we expose correctly for fill-flash??

Use the flash compensation feature on the flash unit. Eg. Shooting a wedding party outdoors? Reduce the light from the flash by (-1 2/3) stop.

It's important to balance the flash output with the background.

- If subject is in the same exposure as the background - reduce the fill flash from anywhere between (- 2/3) to (-1 2/3) depending on the background lighting.

- Subject in more light than the background - use the flash unit with no compensation BUT use the exposure compensation on the camera to reduce the exposure by (- 2/3) on the background

- Subject in less light than the background - increase the camera's exposure compensation by (1/3), reduce the light output from the flash by (-1/3).