Flashless photography

Ok, so you got your first SLR camera. It's an evening, and you feel like taking some photos. You do not have a flash (except for the built in one). What are your options?

• use indoor artificial light (ceiling lamp, desk lamp)
• use outdoor artificial light (street lamps, moving cars, lit windows)

How?

Indoors:
Try to shoot things that do not move, unless you want to capture movement. Forget about shooting children (unless they are sleeping) and animals. If you are at home, set up a mini studio on top of a coffee table or a desk. Pick your favorite toy, or any small item, and arrange it the way you want. Then point the strongest source of light to it, or bring it closer to the strongest lamp in your room. Set your ISO to 800 and open up your aperture wide open. If you have a tripod, use it. Otherwise set your shutter release to "continuous", lean against a floor or something sturdy (to stabilize your arms) and shoot. Keep the shutter button pressed to get at least 10 photos in a row. Hopefully at least one of them will not be fuzzy (due to your hand movement during the exposure).

You can also try taking long exposure photos indoors, and possibly entering the exposure for few seconds. You can try changing your position a couple of times during the exposure for the "ghost" effect.


Outdoors:
Tripod is your friend in this case. If you do not have one, find a bench, railing, window sill, anything you can put your camera on to keep it still. Dial your camera to manual (M) and set the aperture to F18 or so and shutter speed to 25 seconds or so. Don't forget to keep the ISO small (at 200). To avoid shaking the camera, set it on 10 second self timer and wait 10 + 25 seconds to see the result. I find night photography addictive. Every picture comes out different, cars come and go, people move (leaving dark shadows). The photos of lonely street corner, or a busy downtown intersection result in equally big "wow" effect. The night photography is a great excuse to take a walk with your loved one, or discovering different parts of the city you live in.

It is not a throwaway photo!!!

When you weed through all the photos you took, you often end up unhappy about the ratio of good to bad photos, the keepers to the throwaways.

Take a second look at those throwaways. If you do not like something about it, before you delete it, ask yourself if you DO LIKE something about it. If you do, simply crop it, edit it in Picasa (this is what I use, and it is free!!!) or Photoshop (if you have the moneeeeeey) and surprise yourself with the results.

The photo of the garbage container is not very appealing, I almost deleted it. It was not even my idea to take that photo, the place stunk and I wanted to get out of there, but my man insisted that I take a photo of the stinky thing. So I took it. I was later ready to delete it when I thought of the drawing and how it might look in other colors. It looks great with increased contrast and orange hue, and it is one of my favorite prints now, it even happens to match our orange coffee table (not a coincidence).

When you have some time, go over your old photos, and look at them again. Crop, color, blur, sharpen, re-touch them, straighten, de-saturate, ... do anything you want with them. There are hidden gems in everyone's photo collection. They are only waiting for an attentive eye to spot them.

Photography terminology (for newbies)

Here is my attempt to list the basic photography terminology (a photography vocabulary you will need to master before you press the trigger). Note that this list explains the items in a "for dummies" style. When I started learning about shooting, I had to search for the expressions mentioned by other photographers every now and then... and list like this would have helped me a lot.
If you think of an expression I missed, please add a comment with the suggested term. I will be happy to add it to the list.

• hot shoe -- the thing on top of your camera, where you would slide the flash. It has metal parts that touch another metal parts at the bottom of the flash which will allow your camera to close an electrical circuit that triggers the flash
  
• exposure -- amount of light that hits the camera sensor while the shutter is opened
  
• shutter -- a thingie that is in front of the image sensor that opens and closes, allowing the light from the lens to hit the camera image sensor
  
• shutter speed -- how long is the shutter opened (should be long enough to have correct exposure -- enough light should get in to paint a nice picture onto the image sensor)
  
• aperture -- how wide your shutter opens when it opens, determines how wide is the beam of light coming from lens to the camera sensor
• F-number -- a measure of how wide is your aperture, a measure of a "lens speed" (smaller F-number means that the shutter is more opened and more light comes in)
  
• aperture priority -- a setting on a camera that allows you to specify a fixed aperture (and let the camera adjust all other variables to make a correct exposure)
  
• ISO -- a measure of sensitivity of light (use higher ISO number in darker room, low ISO outside in the daylight)
  
• strobe -- flash, speedlight, a thing that emits light
  
• composition -- an arrangement of elements that you are taking a picture of
  
• lens -- a photographic objective -- a device that contains optical lens (or lenses) and other mechanics allowing to focus, to zoom, all while projecting the not-distorted image at the image sensor
  
• focal length -- a measure of how strongly the optical system focuses or defocuses light; the distance in air from the lens or mirror's principal plane to the focus
• focus -- a point of convergence of light
• auto-focus -- a feature of an optical system that allows you to obtain a correct focus on a subject
• light stand -- see the below photo
• umbrella adapter -- click on the below photo and see the notes (picture is worth a thousand words)
• wireless flash triggers -- a.k.a. "pocket wizards", these are devices that tell your strobes to fire when the shutter is pressed on the camera. You mount one trigger on the hot shoe of your camera and another below your flash (flash mounts on a hot shoe of the second trigger). See photo below.
• bokeh -- blurry, fuzzy background, see examples
  

Equipment for beginners

"Whoever said money can't buy happiness simply didn't know where to go shopping." -- Bo Derek

I am a photography newbie and a lady. When I am looking for equipment, I have to get items that fit my criteria:

• the smallest
  
• the lightest
  
• high quality
  
• not expensive
  

Size and weight:
The first thing is the camera. That is the single item (plus its battery) that must be carried everywhere where I want to shoot. It must be small and it must fit in my lady-like purses and little funky urban backpacks (like this one and this one). I do not want to carry a big backpack on my child-like shoulders everywhere I go. Most people do not realize I carry my SLR everywhere, it is not obvious.

I got Nikon D60. 10.2 mega pixels, about a pound of weight (plus lens), and only 94mm tall which means that it can lay (display down, lens up) at the bottom of a 10 cm thick purse or a backpack... not bad. I know there are many reasons other people get fancier cameras, but for the sake of my savings, I do not want to understand these reasons. I want to have a camera that I will overgrow in about 2 years. By that time, I will know exactly what other camera I want or do not want, and that other camera will be available in its newest model. I do not want to carry a complicated heavy camera and not use its functions.

Quality:
I was considering Nikon, Canon, Pentax, and Sony. After observing the folks at Photo Fridays, I narrowed my selections down to Nikon and Canon. Then after a talk with Dustin I narrowed it to D60. D60 offers a vibration reduction (VR) built in into the default lens. It was simple. I listened to the experienced ones and I did some online research to cross-check whether they were bullshitting me or not. D60 it was.

Not expensive:
Ehm... well... yeah. We are talking about photography equipment here.

What to get:
Consider one of these entry level SLR cameras or cameras with similar specs.
Get a simple camera with the default lens (with vibration reduction either in the body or a lens), battery and charger, memory card, and a memory card reader (or a camera cable). That is it. Start simple. It will take you couple of months to get used to carrying that thing everywhere and to start experiencing lens envy, tripod envy, or strobe envy.
Once you get envious, you do not need mine or anyone's advice... you will do your own research and get the stuff you want. Nothing will stop you... once you get into photography, you can not get out. And this is how today I ended up with this.

What can I do with it?

Welcome to my photography blog. My name is Petra, I live in San Francisco. I recently became a photography fan (a beginner). This blog will document my journey through the wonders of photography via a beginner's eye. Therefore, if you are a photography pro, you can stop reading.
If you are a newbie, I hope you fill find my articles helpful and inspiring and you will join our friendly photo community soon.

My own journey started this February (2009) when my Nikon D60 arrived. I ordered it after attending one of the "Photo Fridays". As you probably guessed, it was on Friday. It is one of the weekly events I regularly attend with my co-workers from the Gmail engineering team at Google. At that Photo Friday on February 6, I posed (those who do not have camera or forget it at home must pose for others), and shot a couple of photos using Dave's camera. I liked standing behind the camera more than in front of it and after consulting with (then-a-co-worker now-a-strobist-photography-superstar) Dustin Diaz, I "quickly" ordered my first starter SLR camera -- Nikon D60. The "quickly" is in quotes because Adorama took over a week to deliver.

Since then, I shot thousands of photos (most of which are throwaways) and learned a bit about my camera. Until today, I did not have any flash (strobe, speedlight) so I mostly shot with no flash, although I sometimes leeched on my co-workers' flashes when they brought them to Photo Fridays.

I received a big delivery today -- my very first strobe (Nikon SB-600), my very first 6 feet bogen light stand , my very first pair of Cactus 4 pocket wizards, and my very first pair of studio umbrellas. What can I do with it? Well, first, I arranged it all on the floor, put it next to my Nikon D60 camera, my Slik Mini GM tripod, and other accessories, and took a photo using my little compact camera. To read what exactly all these things are, click on the above photo.

And the journey begins.

Disclaimer:
I am a "Rachel Ray" of photography... meaning "not experienced" and "self trained". So take my blog posts with a pinch of salt.