I am taking a good rest this February weekend. The gear is getting cleared off and ready for more events that we will be covering this month. There is the USA Dance Mid-Atlantic Championships this upcoming weekend. Back to the dance floor with our cameras, and I am sure that the dancers are getting ready as well.
The weekend after is SingStrong DC in Reston, VA! Since this is an anniversary year from when I was first introduced to a cappella music, I will be definitely be ready to get an update on what groups are doing this year. Singing, choreography, arrangements – so many things have changed over the last 20 years, and I look forward to my annual “check-up” on the latest and greatest. If you are in the area, be sure to go to their website to get info on tickets. There will be lots of performances and workshops over the three days. Plus, I can make a photo of you!
On yesterday’s post, I wrote about creating vignettes, in Photoshop. Today, I want to post some photos of another cool way to create vignettes, but this time, doing it in camera. I made these at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, DC. In this walk-through park dedicated to the longest-serving US President, there are many of his quotes engraved into the large pink-colored blocks that make up the monument. You can use the color of the blocks to your advantage as pink and blue are next to each other on the color wheel, so they will work together well in a frame. Here is a frame of the manual exposure setup in the camera without the flash:
I am just looking to keep a dark, saturated blue in the sky. The flash will be used to illuminate the foreground and pop the subject out of the frame. To setup the flash, I put a warming gel over the front of the flash. Additionally I zoomed the head in to 180mm. This focuses the flash into a tight circle as opposed to just spilling light all over the scene. This is what creates the vignette effect which will draw your viewer’s eye to where you want it to go. I hand held the flash with my left hand, and made this photo:
How far you zoom the head, can make the circle of light larger. Especially if you have more of an area you want to cover in light. This next photo, I zoomed the head out farther since I was standing farther away, and had more words that I wanted to light:
It was a challenge to get the light exactly right. Sometimes, I would flash the ground, sometimes, I would only light the trees above the blocks. It would be much easier to do this with the flash on a stand that you can control with more consistency, but I did not want to risk any entanglements with the park rangers. I simply used a hot shoe cable cord to get the flash off the camera, and fired away. Give it a try next time to get a different look at places that are photographed all the time!
When Adobe Lightroom first came on the scene, it added the ability to create vignettes. I saw many photos with the darkened corners. It was not until I installed the beta of the program that I saw why! This look stems from the technical deficiencies of old cameras. Some larger format cameras or older lenses were not as precise with their ability to transmit light to the edges.
Now, every image editing app from Instagram to Snapseed has a way to purposefully add vignettes to your photos. I saw a demonstration where Parker J. Pfister had extreme uses of vignettes in his photos that brought the darkness in much farther into the frame. Some of the darkening did not even follow a light fall-off pattern that an old lens would produce, but the images were stunning. The reason that this works is that your eye will be attracted to the brightest thing in the frame first.
In most cases, you will want the brightest part of the frame to be your subjects face if you are photographing a person. Sometimes it will be an object in the foreground that you would like to emphasize over the background. Adding a vignette is very easy in the Effects panel of Lightroom 5. After you make your crop, the Post-Crop Vignetting tool is used to darken the corners, and you can set how far into the frame you would like to darken. You can also set how much you would like the vignette to darken, and how dramatic a drop off you want that to happen. Be cautious that you do not over do it! Over darkening of these edges where it becomes too obvious can make it distracting for your viewers taking away from the overall impact of the image.
