Don’t fear tricky light
Of the many influences that digital imaging can have on the kind of pictures you make, the biggest may be its impact on low light photography. Unlike shooting film, the LCD screen on the digicam’s back provides instant feedback, allowing you not only to make exposure changes but also to tweak depth-of-field to get just what you want. On top of that, there’s the whole question of color balance or “white balance,” a video industry term photographers have been stuck with.
Some digital SLRs such as the Olympus E-1 and Canon’s EOS 10D, EOS 1Ds, and EOS 1D Mark II, let you set specific color temperatures. The EOS 10D, for example, lets you set a White Balance Color Temperature from 2800K to 10000K in 100K increments. So what’s the color temperature at a motorcycle show? In addition to all kinds of mixed lighting, colorful vehicles parked all around toss color pollution into the mix just to make it more interesting. Who are you gonna call? Minolta’s Color Meter IIIF, that’s who.
It’s not just for film photographers anymore. When you need to know color temperature, you need a color temperature meter. Motorcycle shows are held in interesting venues and sometimes the color temperature can vary as much 1000-2000 degrees Kelvin depending on where you are standing
How do you take color temperature readings? Simple. You place the meter at subject position, pointing toward the main light source, the same position that you would use for making an incident light meter reading. Now push the button and it displays the color temperature in degrees Kelvin. No translation necessary; nyet, nada, nothin’. It doesn’t get much simpler than that. So I set the WB setting to K, then I dialed up that number on the back of the EOS 10D, and made perfectly color balanced pictures the first time that needed no tweaking in Adobe Photoshop CS.
Canon EOS 10D at ISO 800, shutter speed 1/45 sec at f/4.5 with Canon EF 28-105mm lens.
Some low light tricks don’t change with digital. Slow shutter speeds means you need a sturdy tripod and lately I’ve been using what I call my Joe Farace Signature Edition Tiltall tripod because it delivers a good combination of steadiness and style. Many indoor or outdoor shows won’t allow tripods, so the long discontinued Gitzo (www.bogenimaging.com) Safaripod or the Adorama (www.Adorama.com) Podmatic monopod is my single-legged support of choice. But more often than not, shooting in little or no light means an increase in ISO speeds. With CMOS or CCD imaging sensors, a combination of slow shutter speeds and high ISO spells N-O-I-S-E. Okay, traditional film photographers have to cope with grain from higher ISO film too, so the trade-off between working with the two media ain’t all that different.
Canon EOS 10D at ISO 800, shutter speed 1/20 sec at f/4.5 with EF 28-105mm lens.
While in Indianapolis to photograph the US Grand Prix, I looked out my hotel window just before going to bed and saw the city’s sparkling AAA baseball stadium before me. I grabbed the Olympus E-1 I was using to photograph the race and made a grab shot. It wasn’t great but I could see the potential of making some fun images. At midnight I walked over to the stadium and started making photographs using Oly’s 14-54mm f/2.8-3.5 lens. I set the camera in Program mode and using one of the flat sides of an octagonal-shaped light pole to brace the camera (there’s never a tripod around when you need one) made an exposure at ISO 800 at f/2.8 and 1/40 sec in shutter-priority mode. My first shot didn’t look bad, but it didn’t look good either.
I shot all of these photographs using Olympus’ Raw Format (ORF) to get the maximum quality since I knew noise was going to be an issue, and the better the quality of file that I started with, the better results I could expect. That’s the inverse of the old computer saw “garbage in, garbage out.” Later I used Adobe Photoshop CS built-in RAW plug-in to access the image. Look at the histogram and you can see that my exposure is kind of “thin” in film terms, but more exposure isn’t always the answer in night photography. Or is it?
For the next few shots, I adjusted the exposure compensation to give more exposure and got some softer hand-held photographs as a result. Then I hit on another idea: Why not use flash. So there I am on the corner of a busy street after midnight photographing Victory Stadium using Olympus’ FL-50 flash with a healthy Guide Number of 164 (at ISO 100) and here I am shooting at 800. I’m sure the people driving by thought it was nuts; heck, maybe I am. I was now able to shoot at f/5 for some more depth of field. I didn’t like the cropping, but I was at the widest-angle setting and that’s where my light pole ”tripod” was and wanted to keep the sign that had a photo of Andres Galleraga, one of my baseball heroes, in the frame.
This was the last of the twenty or so frames I made that night. I’m not sure how many I made because RAW files take a lot of space and I ended up erasing one or two so I could make “one more shot.” (You know the feelin’.) It was shot at 3/10 sec at f/6.3 and yes, Virginia, it was hand-held, inasmuch as propping the camera on a light pole can be called “hand-held.” There was also some tweaking in Photoshop, including creating an additional layer, specifically for the sign with the photograph of “The Big Cat” on it, that was separately color corrected for the fluorescent lighting using Picto’s (www.picto.com) iCorrect Professional plug-in to get the colors to be more neutral. Most of the layer was erased; only the area over the top of the sign was retained.
Is this an available light photograph? Well, I did use the light that was available. And while the final picture isn’t as tack sharp as maybe it could be, I think the most important person to please is (as Rick Nelson sang in Madison Square Garden) “ourselves.” Did I have fun making this photograph of Victory Stadium at night? Absolutely. But do I wish I had that Adorama Podmatic monopod and Minolta Color Meter IIIF with me in Indy? You bet I did.
All photographs ©2004 Joe Farace
Joe Farace is Colorado-based photographer/writer who has written or edited 24 books and 1400 magazine stories. Visit his websites at www.joefarace.com and www.joefaraceshootscars.com.
