Laowa 7.5mm f/2 MFT for Astrophotography? YASSS!

So yes, the Laowa 7.5mm f/2.0 together with my GX7 can make some really awesome wide-field Astrophotography shots in a relatively small package.

ISO 200, 25 seconds shutter speed, and f/2.0 wide open for the Milky Way exposure. These are actually blended exposures, the other exposure for the house was taken using the same setting except that the shutter speed is about 8 seconds or so.

The exposures were processed in Lightroom, and then blended in Photoshop.

I must say I'm very satisfied with the result of this combination. Maybe I'll have a chance to photograph Northern Light again in the future, then I'll bring this lens along and get some awesome shots!!

Enjoy!

DIY Focus Calibration Repair on Laowa 7.5mm f/2.0 MFT

Dear all,

I know what you're thinking. You just received that shiny new Laowa 7.5mm f/2.0 for your MFT camera, you're all excited and jumping in joy, you grabbed the camera outside, find some nice place to do some test shots, focused the lens, took the shot, got back home, and when the files are on your computer everything looks mushy and lack details especially on faraway objects at its largest aperture, no matter how you set the focus on the lens.

My friends, I am sorry to say that your Laowa 7.5mm isn't properly calibrated. The lens couldn't focus to infinity eventhough the focus marker goes to infinity and beyond. I had the same problem too and I know some might have the same problem. Not all of the copy of this lens have the same issue though, so if your lens produce an adequately sharp picture, your lens is fine.

But fear not, today I'm going to show you how to repair it yourself. I know, you can send it back to them for a replacement unit, or wait for it to get repaired by Laowa. I took a slightly more savage route and repair it myself. This post was inspired by an article about fixing Samyang 7.5mm FE lens that someone gave to me during a conversation in a forum(here's the link).

Before we continue, let me remind you that doing this can void your warranty, and there's a very high risk of ruining your lens very badly. There's also a very high chance that doing this will introduce decentering to your lens. I do not suggest you to do this if you are not confident enough to open a lens, sending it back to Laowa is a better idea, or alternatively you can ask a professional lens repairer around your area. I am not going to be responsible for your action should you do what I'm about to show you.

So with that out of the way, let's start, shall we. Here are the tools that you need:
1. A very good, sturdy, plus-shaped screwdriver.
2. A piece of paper(the usual paper for your home printer will work just fine).
3. A roll of double-sided tape.
4. A good lighting so that you can clearly see the screws and the holes inside your lens.
5. Flat surface, a table or something.
6. Rocket blower or similar, the one that you use to blow air into your sensor.
7. Micro fiber cloth, just in case you accidentaly touch any of the lens elements.

Basically, what I'm about to do is to add something in between the lens' rear element and its holder that connects to the focusing mechanism inside the lens so that there's an increased distance from the rear element to mimic added focus rotation on the lever to the direction of infinity focus. There must be a better way than this, but for now I am adding the distance by adding just pieces of thin layer of paper.

Step 1:

Put the lens on your table with the front element facing down. Remove the rear cap, and now you'll see the bayonet mount. On the bayonet mount, there are 4 screws that are holding the bayonet mount with the chassis of the lens. Remove those screws carefully. They are really tight, so be patient with them and do not use excess power as you may strip the screws and will make it harder to screw/unscrew them. There's an extra screw that screws-horizontally to the middle part of the bayonet mount, ignore that screw.

Step 2:

Remove the bayonet mount, now you'll see that the rear element is being held together by 4 screws that screw the rear element into the middle part of the lens that has something to do with the focus lever. Remove those 4 screws. Careful, avoid touching the glasses, they are difficult to clean. Ignore the screws on the outer part of this section, just remove the 4 inner screws that are holding the rear elements.

Step 3:

Once you unscrew those screws, take the rear element, flip it around so that the rearest element is facing down, and put it on the table. Put some microfiber cloth between the table and the rear element, so you can minimize the chance of the rear element gets scratched.

Depending on how bad your mis-focus is, you may need to layer the pieces of paper, or use slightly thinner paper. On my case, on the infinity mark, at f/2.0 only objects that are about 2 to 4 meters away are in focus. On the maximum rotation of the lens, only objects that are about 3 to 5 meters away are in focus. I will need to get at least to 4 or 5 meters so that it can reach optimal hyperfocal distance and get everything from that distance to infinity in focus.

In my case, a single layer of paper is enough. If your lens focus only to about 1 meter or less, then it's a good idea to stack multiple layers of paper, so cut more pieces or fold the 4 pieces so that they mimick stacked layers of paper. This is all just approximation by the way. If you only need the lens to focus a hair further, then don't use the regular home printer paper, use something thinner instead. You get the idea.

Now cut 4 small pieces of paper about 0.5cm x 0.2cm, and put some double tape on one side. Put these 4 taped pieces of paper to the outer plate that has the screw holes on the rear element. Put them on the surface that doesn't have the screw holes. Make sure that all pieces of paper have the same uniform thickness, otherwise you could cause some serious decentering on the lens. Remove the protective layer of the double sided tape.

Step 4:

Blow some air with the rocket blower to the inner core of the main part of the lens, where the rear element should be, and remove any dust that might have entered that part of the lens. Now place the rear element back to its place, and screw the screws back together. After you add the pieces of paper, you might need to screw the screws more carefully.

Step 5:

Again, blow some air on the surface of the part of the lens where the bayonet mounting should be, and remove any dust that might have been there. Now place back the bayonet mounting, and screw the screws back together.

Step 6:

Again, blow some air on the bayonet mount and the rear element to remove any dust on it, and then mount the lens to your camera. Try the fixed focus and see how it performs. You might need to re-do the whole thing and adjust the thickness of the pieces of paper until you get the focus to focus properly to infinity, not "to infinity and beyond".

Alternatively, if you are lazy and don't mind innaccurate focus markers, you can just find the new infinity focus point and mark it yourself with a pen or scratch it permanently using blade. The way to do this is to focus on an object that is faraway, at least 5 meters away from you, at f/2.0. Mark the focus position on the lens at the point where your objects are at the sharpest focus. That's it! Now everytime you shoot, just focus to that mark, and you'll get anything from 5 meters to infinity all in focus.

I hope you find this post to be useful. Cheers and God bless you! :)

Product Photography using Strobist/Off Camera Flash Technique, Video Tutorial

Hey guys, just wanted to share a video of me explaining how I did some of the earlier strobist product photography shots that I did. I created this video to further show my perspective on how the whole photography process from start to finish.

In the video, I went for the "low key" look which means dark background and high contrast look on the images. This helps to create that interesting visual "pop" on the images to capture the attention of anyone who looked at your photos.

I photographed 3 different kind of products of different size and texture, so that you can get a feel of how the technique will apply to just about any small product that you will photograph. I used my trustee GX8 with the 12-35mm f/2.8 lens to do the whole thing, as well as to video myself on some parts of the tutorial. For the semi-top-down view of the photography process footages, I used my LX100.

The main thing that I want to emphasize here is that you have to experiment and repeat until you get the best result that you are looking for. By moving things around and change the settings a little bit on both the camera and the flash, you will gradually alter the look of the image a bit, and after a few repeat and observation, you will surely nail the look that you want.

Here is the video, I hope you enjoy the tutorial, cheers and God bless you :)

How I Shoot It #7: Strobist Environmental Portait, Tokyo Skytree

Hello everyone, today I want to share another "How I Shoot It" post. Today we will discuss my favorite type of photography: strobist environmental portrait. Basically, what that means is, you shoot a portrait with a scenery, and add some off-camera-speedlight(flash) to light the subject, so that you can control and expose the subject and the scenery separately.
  
Now why on earth do you need to do that? Have you ever encountered a back-lit situation, where the scenery/background seemed to look so bright, that if you expose for the background, the subject will look very underexposed, and when you try to expose for the subject, the whole scenery just looked totally white? Well, off camera flash is your answer to making sure that you have control over both exposures: the subject and the background.
  
Now you may ask again, why off camera flash? Because it will give that 3D look on your subject rather than the usual flat, harsh, fake look that you always get using on camera flash or built in flash. When the flash is fired from an angle and not straight forward from the camera, you'll get a very interesting sculpting light that will enhance the feel of your portrait subject. Depending on what you are after, you can make the light more dramatic by introducing shadows to your subject. This is done by severing the angle more to the side of the subject. But often times, you want the subject to look more toned down, and thus you might need to aim your flash from a slightly straighter angle. More on that here.
   
This kind of environmental portrait is actually very important to understand, because this could be the perfect technique that you might need when you are doing travel photography. You could photograph your loved ones using this technique and get an excellent, repeatable result, using just a camera, a lens, a speedlight, and someone to hold your flash.
  
Now, without further babbling, here is the picture that I want to share:

Strobist Environmental Portrait, Tokyo Skytree

This picture was taken last month on a trip to Japan with my friends. The huge tower behind me is actually Tokyo Skytree, a very famous tall tower in Tokyo. My friend actually took this picture(thanks Marsha!), and another friend held the speedlight to light me from the side(thanks Charlotte and Carissa!).
   
The key concept here is just a portrait with a scenery on the background to provide context of place and time. The Skytree tower provides the place context, while the afternoon sky provides the time context of the photo. This is a very typical travel photograph that you will take, and doing this using the technique that I will explain will actually help you take a better travel photograph compared to just your available/natural light environmental portrait.
  

Technical Details

Camera Setting

I shot this using my favorite camera ever: The Panasonic GX8, using my favorite lens ever: Panasonic 12-35mm f/2.8. This was shot at f/8, shutter speed of 1/320sec, and ISO 100. It's all full manual, and it was based on a trial exposure that I took before hand of the scenery.
  

Technique

To be able to understand how to shoot using speedlight in bright sunny day like my picture above, you have to know the limitation of using speedlight in bright sunny day: shutter speed. Your camera can't register what your flash shoots above a certain shutter speed. This shutter speed limit is called the flash sync speed. This is what you need to know from your camera, AND you have to try to break that sync speed too and see if it really is correct.
  
In my GX8, the known sync speed is 1/250s, which means anything above 1/250s will cause the camera to not register the flash exposure. This means if you shoot 1/500s or 1/1000s, there will be some dark/black bars on your picture, caused by the shutter plane not moving fast enough to catch up with the flash. But I experimented with my GX8, and I found out that I can still shoot 1/320s without that black bar appearing, so I can safely say that my particular GX8 has a 1/320s sync speed(yes, I'm one lucky son of a beach hahaha!). Your GX8 might not behave the same way unfortunately, so you have to test it by yourself.
  
Moving on, I first checked the exposure of the scenery. To do this, I need to put the camera on full manual(sorry, no single automation allowed folks!), and I set the shutter speed to 1/320s. I then adjust the ISO and aperture accordingly until I find the right exposure or 0EV as dictated by the metering system of the camera. In this case, I was shooting on a bright sunny afternoon, so I want the lowest ISO possible. I then set the ISO to 100(it's the lowest ISO on the GX8, but not the lowest native ISO), and set my aperture accordingly until it reaches 0EV. The ISO and shutter speed gave me f/8.
  
After I took care of the ambient exposure, I started messing with the speedlight.I don't use modifier in this picture, except for a 1/4 CTO gel that is permanently attached to the flash, so I don't need to compensate the power for the modifier. I began by testing the flash exposure on my friend, with the flash positioned 1 meter away from her, at camera left, almost 90 degrees from the camera angle to get the most dramatic lighting on me as possible.  I started at 1/4 power, and then adjust my flash power from there. Took a test shot, apparently 1/4 power was too much, so I dial down to 1/8. I tested again, still too much, so I set it to 1/16 and it was perfect!
   
I then asked my friend to hold the flash, and frame my composition. Once I'm done, I asked my other friend to compose as I did, and then I posed and she took the picture immediately.
  
Composition wise, I want to have the Tokyo Skytree to appear very dominant in the image as a scenery, because it's the main context of place in the picture. I want it to fill the frame, while I want myself to fill just half or a quarter of the frame. I used 12mm on my 12-35mm, that is like 24mm on full frame. Anything wider than that will make the picture looks distorted, but anything tighter than that will make it difficult for me to get the whole skytree in the frame. So 12mm is a sweet spot in my opinion.
   
I tried to include foreground elements such as the roof of the building in front of the skytree, as well as the fence to enhance the picture a bit, so that the picture can have more elements that provide more context to enhance the Skytree. One thing to keep in mind, don't clip the top of the Skytree, clip just the bottom part of it, like in my picture. It looks better that way, trust me!
  

Post Processing

I always shoot RAW, just in case I messed up so bad in my image. Think of it as sort of an insurance. You pay a bit to cover the risk. In this case, you pay for a bit of storage space, but you'll gain very flexible images that are very tweakable and hopefully repairable when you messed up.
   
Thankfully, this image is already near-perfect and is very close to what I have in mind. Also, since we are using speedlight, there isn't much thing that needs to be done in the post processing, because the speedlight improves the quality of the light in the picture dramatically.
      
The only thing that will require a bit of slider-action is the Skytree itself. We are exposing for both the Skytree and the sky, and as the result of the metering of the camera, the Skytree appeared a bit dark. So we need to raise the exposure of the Skytree. All I did was to raise the shadow by about +30 or +40, and drop the highlight a bit by about -20 or -30 to balance the sky with the Skytree. Compensate for both the shadow and higlight repair by adding some contrast to the image, and we're done.
   
If you are feeling ballsy, you can shoot this in JPEG with your desired picture profile, and not post process your image at all. It can be done, but don't mess up, because once you messed up a JPEG image, it's actually messed up forever and you can't repair it.
    

How to Improve?

I could have used a large modifier like an umbrella to make the light softer, and compensate the power of the speedlight by both using a leaf shutter camera and firing the flash at full power. That will give a better light quality on me. Unfortunately, it will also means a significant amount of gear that I need to carry. It's also inconspicuous, that kind of setup will make the security guard comes close and stop you from taking the picture.
  
I could also choose a more proper time of the day, when the sun is lighting the Skytree tower from the front, and thus having both the sky and the Skytree in the same range of exposure without the need to raise the shadow and to kill the highlight. That way, the speedlight also doesn't need to work as hard, and can be used to light from a different angle and makes the whole picture more interesting.
  
But overall, I'm very happy with my result of this picture. I hope this picture will inspire you to take great travel portrait of you and your travel buddies with great scenery in the background.
   
Leave me any comments if you have questions or suggestions.
  
That's all for today, cheers and God bless you :)
  

Minimalist and Compact Traveling Strobist: Traveling Light With Your Light

Hey all, sorry for the lack of update, I've been very busy lately and also I traveled to a lot of places extensively during this last couple of months. Today I want to talk about how I go about traveling with off-camera-flash setup, or what I love to call Minimalist Traveling Strobist. This is my version of ULTRA COMPACT STROBIST SETUP.

  

Why?

Say, you're going to visit a nice beautiful European village during a nice beautiful spring-sunny week during your holiday with your loved ones. You're now planning your itinerary and already checked out some crazy cool sceneries on Flickr or Google Image, and you want to have your loved ones photographed with those sceneries with the highest quality possible.

   

Now, people usually will just bring a camera and shoot. They will shoot with whatever light condition that is available at that time, and they think the better the camera/lens, the better the result is. Okay, you could always go natural/available light, and yes you could get some nice image provided that the sun is on the "correct" angle compared to the scenery. But if the sun angle isn't right, then you will potentially encounter backlit photographs. To compensate for backlit scenes, your camera needs to have such crazy dynamic range that you can pull up the shadow so much while keeping the highlights from clipping. But even so, with natural/available light, you'll most likely end up with underexposed subject, or blown scenery, so you'll have to really push things in editing carefully if you want to make the most out of it. That means hours of Lightroom development doing touch ups with the brush tools, pushing/pulling the shadow/higlight faders, endless adjustment using the radial filter, trying to crush overexposed sky/background, and finally cursing followed by keyboard smashing everytime the edge of your histogram clips.
 

See that grey sky? It's supposed to be clouds with a hint of a little blue sky here and there. I tried pulling the highlight as far as I could but it's just lost and turned into grey sky.

   

Sounds tiring?

That's where the strobist or off-camera-flash photography comes in. In short, it'll allow you to take perfectly exposed photo of a scenery with people in it; the kind of photos that is really suited for holiday photo. Strobist technique will allow you to control both the background(scenery) and the subject independently for the best exposure possible, regardless of the background lighting condition. This will save you a lot of time in your post production, and you will get a much more pleasing image that isn't backlit, or overly post-processed. Heck, you can even shoot JPEG with this technique if you feel ballsy about it!
  
I suggest you to check out www.strobist.com before we continue. Mr. David Hobby explained a lot of important basic strobist stuffs that you need to learn to understand strobist photography quickly. But basically, you will use a flash that's placed not on the camera to light your subject and you will control both the flash exposure and the background exposure until you get the right balance that you need for the photo.
  

Basics

Now before we continue, keep in mind that we're also talking about traveling. That means everything has to be very compact; keeping the gear weight as low as possible, because you are traveling with someone else with schedules that are mostly not photographic, and probably photography also isn't the main purpose of the travel. As with general travel photography, this means minimal gear, minimal weight, and trading gear quality with convenience at some level but for the purpose of producing reasonably high quality photographs that is still much better than your average travel photographs. I know, it kind of contradicts, right? Trading gear quality and high quality photographs? We're talking about traveling light with your light, bear with me on that...
  
Obviously, with strobist photography we are usually doing environmental portraits. That means, moderate-to-normal wide angle focal length, full-to-half body portraits with nice scenery as backgrounds. We are talking about 28mm to 50mm focal length on full frame equivalent on our lens here. We will very rarely do tight portraits during travel, because we want to include the scenery to better tell the travel experience for the photo viewer. We can always do the bokeh thingy later at home, there is no use of doing bokeh thingy during travel, it's a waste of nice scenery.
  
And there's a special note on the light that you must understand. As much as I love and adore soft light for the ultimate environmental portrait results, and even if the Lighting 101 on www.strobist.com suggests you to start with a shoot-thru umbrella as a soft modifier, we are NOT going to use any modifier at all. We are going to shoot hard light, bare flash, no modifier, straight into our subject.
     
I repeat, NO MODIFIER!
  
Ouch! This will contradict what you learned in www.strobist.com. However, whether you like it or not, we are going to learn to light with just a single hard light as our key light. Call me crazy, call me names, curse at me, and spit on me if you like! This might not be for you, but I've done it and to my taste the result isn't bad at all. Keep in mind: we are "traveling light with your light".
  

Gear

For our camera choice, ultimately we want a leaf-shutter-equipped camera like the Fuji X100 series, Panasonic LX100, or similar cameras. Most of them will have built in lens(except Hasselblad or Phase One medium format cameras), due to the shutter mechanism of a leaf shutter system, but these leaf-shuttered cameras can sync your flash at incredibly high shutter speed and make your flash appear more powerful in your images, so that's where the advantage of a leaf shutter cameras lies. But if you don't have one, no sweat, we can still find some work-around with the regular focal plane shutter to squeeze the most out of your light. It goes without saying that you need to have a camera that has a fully functional hotshoe, otherwise you can't conveniently use off camera flash on outdoor situation. For me, I personally use the Panasonic LX100 as my leaf shutter camera, but I do this kind of strobist setup also with my Panasonic GX8, Olympus E-PL6(already sold), and the good old Panasonic GX7 too, with little to no problem at all.
   
For the lens, as with all environmental portrait, we will have something in the range of 24mm to 50mm on full frame. Fix lens camera with single focal length like the Fuji X100 or Sony RX1 will do fantastic job as they both have 35mm equivalent lens. The 28mm equivalent on Fuji X70 will also be a good choice, provided that you are willing to get closer a bit to your subject or willing to have wider field of view. Panasonic LX100 also comes with 24-75mm equivalent lens built in, which makes it an even better option as you can zoom to alter your perspective and field of view, albeit with slightly smaller M4/3 sensor which isn't bad at all compared to APS-C offerings. As for the aperture, f/2.8 is the minimum if you are planning to shoot low light, but if you only shoot during daytime, then definitely f/4.0 will be enough. Even f/5.6 is still usable for bright daylight shooting, plus you get good depth of field at wide open already. I don't recommend anything tighter than 40mm because of the technique that we will use for this minimalist traveling strobist setup, which I will explain later.
   
For your flash to camera connection, I can only suggest wireless transceivers. OCF cords are big, bulky, and will eat some space/weight. Though they are highly reliable, they aren't necessary for what we're going to do. So just stick with wireless transceivers, and don't go for the big bulky ones even if the transceivers will have tons of features. Go with the smaller ones, as long as they are reliable, you are good to go. My personal recommendation are Phottix Strato Multi II if you have the budget. Or YongNuo RF603 II if you want to save some money. I'd lean more toward the YongNuo RF603 II, for a reason that I will explain below.
    
As for the light, I suggest find something that isn't terribly large, but with enough punch to fight the sun. No need to go for any High Speed Sync flash, or TTL-compatible flash, we don't need those features and you don't want to spend a fortune on them as well. A regular manual speedlight with decent enough output and good reliability will be more than enough to do the job. I personally use YongNuo flashes like the 560IV, 560EX, 510EX, which are all more than enough for what we do. I prefer the 560IV because it has built in transceivers inside, and this unit is compatible with they YongNuo RF603 II, thus eliminating the need to place a receiver unit on the flash and save some weight and space. If you already use the RF603 II, you are lucky! In case you haven't figured it out yet, that's the reason why I use the RF603 II!
    

My Personal Kit

As you already can tell from what I said previously, my kit consists of a Panasonic LX100, a pair of YongNuo RF603 II transceivers, and a YongNuo 560IV speedlight. Sometimes I need to decrease my depth of field, so I also carry a 3-stop screw on ND and increase my aperture to get the job done and to double as a video ND to get to my frame rate shutter speed. Alternatively, a 1 stop CPL will replace the 3-stop ND to act as a small-power ND if I don't need to kill that much light, and to double as reflection reducer. I just need to make sure that I don't forget to bring my step up ring for the filters, and those are all I need.
     

   
I can easily store these compact strobist kit in a small bag like the ONA Bowery. Or if I wear my short cargo pants, I'll store all of them in the pockets. I'll keep one of the RF603 II attached to the LX100 all the time, and another one just for backup. As I mentioned above, the YN560IV has the built in transceivers function that's compatible with the RF603 II, so I don't need to attach the other RF603 II to the flash.
   

     
Alternatively, I could replace the leaf-shutter-equipped LX100 with a regular focal plane shutter camera if I need to use specialized lens. I'm pretty sure most of you don't have a leaf shutter camera, so this setup will work for your current setup. On the picture above, I use a GX7 with 20mm f/1.7(40mm equivalent) instead of the LX100. A 3-stop ND filter is a must for this setup, because you will need to drop down that shutter speed to get your flash to sync with your camera with the highest shutter speed possible. Thankfully, the YN560IV is still powerful enough to compensate for the 3-stop ND, all you need to do is just increase the power of the flash by 3 stop.
     

 

     
And the picture above is my compact strobist kit, complete with an 8" Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 tablet for quick JPEG editing and sharing(thank goodness for the Wifi and in-camera-RAW in the LX100!!), a small notepad, some pens and writing tools, a pair of earphones, and a battery bank; all fits well in the small ONA Bowery, and all ready for some action.
   
BTW some quick tip, Lightroom Mobile and Photoshop Express are the best image processing apps for JPEG. If you need to edit RAW, then I suggest you to add the PhotoMate R3 for basic RAW editing, export the JPEG from PhotoMate, and further process the image with Lightroom Mobile and Photoshop Express.
   

Technique

Now that we covered all the gears required, it's time to discuss what matters the most: how to do it. I will cover this in three areas: Exposure, Light Angle, and Composition. Shooting with flash will require you to think of an image as a combination of two different exposures:
1. The exposure of the ambient light, affecting the background or the scenery that doesn't get the light from the flash.
2. The exposure of the flash itself, affecting the area that you point your flash at, in this case it's usually your subject.
     
In the next steps, I'm assuming that we are shooting during bright daylight when the sunshine is very abundant which is the time when photographing a subject with a nice scenery will be very difficult without the help of a flash.
   
First, we want to make sure that the combination between the two exposures are perfectly balanced, and that you are not letting any of these two exposures go way too high or way too low. You can of course slightly overexpose or slightly underexpose on purpose if you want, this might give you a slightly more artistic look that you want.
   
Furthermore, we are shooting without modifier, and in my experience, hard light doesn't go well with scenery that is too underexposed compared to the subject. Hard light doesn't have the quality that can add to the overall surreal element of the picture that is often associated with such underexposed-background image style. If you try to underexpose your background too much, it'll look more like an instant backdrop-photo-booth than a high quality strobist image. So, I recommend the scenery to be exposed perfectly at 0EV.
  
Second step, let's brush up our flash photography exposure theory very quickly.
1. Aperture affects both ambient exposure and flash exposure.
2. ISO affects both ambient exposure and flash exposure.
3. Shutter speed only affects ambient exposure.
4. Flash power only affects flash exposure.
(hidden rule: ND filter affects both ambient exposure and flash exposure, according to how powerful the ND is)
  
Next, if you are using a leaf shutter camera, then you will have little to no problem with getting the flash and ambient exposure to work together. If you have normal focal plane shutter camera, skip to the next section. Here's how I do it with leaf shutter camera:
1. Set your flash exposure on 1/8 power.
2. Set your camera exposure with ISO 200, f/5.6, 1/1000 second. During bright daylight, this will usually nail the exposure of the sky at +1EV according to Sunny 16 rule, but the surface will be right at 0EV, which is what we want.
3. Without turning on the flash, test the exposure on the camera first, and see how the scenery looks like. If it's too dark, change the shutter speed to 1/500. If it's too bright, go down to ISO 100.
4. Now turn on your flash, and shoot your subject with your flash aimed to him/her from 45 degree upper left or upper right at about 40cm away from your subject. Hold your flash using your left hand and aim as best as you can, or if you have someone to assist you, ask them to hold the flash for you. Check how the picture turns out to be with the flash being added. If the subject is too bright, dial down the power on the flash to 1/16, and if the subject is too dark, set the power to 1/4.
5. Alternatively, if both the scenery and the subject is either too bright or too dark, you can compensate by adjusting the aperture or ISO. Go to f/4 if everything is too dark, and go to f/8 if everything is too bright. Alternatively, if your lens can't go faster than f/5.6, go to ISO 100 if everything is too bright, and go to ISO 400 if everything is too dark.
   
Here's how I do it with regular focal plane camera and with a 3 stop ND:
1. Screw on a 3 stop ND filter in front of your lens.
2. Set your flash exposure on FULL power.
3. Set your camera exposure with ISO 200, f/5.6, 1/125 second. During bright daylight, this will usually nail the exposure of the sky at +1EV according to Sunny 16 rule, but the surface will be right at 0EV, which is what we want.
4. Without turning on the flash, test the exposure on the camera first, and see how the scenery looks like. If it's too dark, change the shutter speed to 1/60. If it's too bright, go down to ISO 100 or f/8.0.
5. Now turn on your flash, and shoot your subject with your flash aimed to him/her from 45 degree upper left or upper right at about 40cm away from your subject. Hold your flash using your left hand and aim as best as you can, or if you have someone to assist you, ask them to hold the flash for you. Check how the picture turns out to be with the flash being added. If the subject is too bright, dial down the power on the flash to 1/2 or 1/4. With focal plane shutter and full power flash, you can only increase flash power by bringing in the flash closer to the subject, as dictated by Inverse Square Law.
6. Alternatively, if both the scenery and the subject is either too bright or too dark, you can compensate by adjusting the aperture or ISO. Go to f/4 if everything is too dark, and go to f/8 if everything is too bright. Alternatively, if your lens doesn't go to f/4, compensate the ISO instead and go to ISO 100 if everything is too bright, and go to ISO 400 if everything is too dark.
   
Composition wise, we are talking about environmental portrait, so we need to balance the scenery with the subject as best as we could, so that both are complementing each other in the composition . I usually go with rule of thirds and just use 1/3 for the subject and 2/3 for the scenery. It usually works. Alternatively, you can also use more negative space, or go the opposite direction and have your subject stands out more in the picture. A matter of taste, it's your call. Experiment with many different look to get the best result.
    
Light-angle wise, I would recommend severe side lighting to achieve Rembrandt light so that you can get more dimension out of your subjects. That means you can fire the speedlight anywhere between 45 to 90 degree horizontally, while keeping the light slightly higher than the height of the person. If the light is too on-axis, it'll look very fake and not pleasing at all because it is a hard light source without modifier. Also be cautious, Rembrandt light isn't always the best choice for lighting people with lots of wrinkles on his/her face(old people mostly), so use this technique carefully. But don't let this rule hinders you, experiment with your light angle often and see what works for you and what doesn't.
    

But I Need Soft Modifier!

Okay, if you insist, go get a Rogue FlashBender or similar bounce modifier. It's small, light, flat, portable, and it'll help to give you a slightly softer look from close range, and it'll help reducing harsh shadow and make fall-offs more gradual. It's gonna eat some flash power though, so keep that in mind!
     
Here are some examples of what you can achieve with this technique and set of gears:

   

       

 

          

         
That's all for this post, I hope you find this Traveling Light With Your Light post helpful, and if you like it please share it with your friends. Thank you, and God bless you!


  
  

How I Shoot It #6: Partial Solar Eclipse Using Micro Four Thirds

Hello everyone, today I'm back with another "How I Shoot It" post. This time I want to share a bit of astro-photography that I do sometimes with Micro Four Thirds. As you know, recently there's a Solar Eclipse that happened here in Indonesia last week, and I photographed the whole thing from start to finish.

So here you go, the partial solar eclipse pictures:
      

    

     

 

   

 

   

 

   
As you can see, I took a whole bunch of sun pictures on that day, and although I can't really get any detail out of the sun, I'm quite happy with the result. All of these pictures are taken using my Panasonic GX7 and Panasonic Lumix 100-300mm f/4.0-5.6 G Vario lens, with a bunch of some others stuff that I will mention later.
  

Camera Settings

f/5.6 at the beginning of the eclipse when it's still early in the morning, f/8.0-f/11.0 at the peak of the eclipse, and f/16 at almost the end of the eclipse, when the sun is bright. Shutter speed is always around 1/4000 or 1/8000. ISO is always 200, can't risk 100 because of the lack of dynamic range at that ISO for the GX7, which you will need to recover some detail from the sun should the light gets unpredictable.
   

IMPORTANT! I used 10-12 stops worth of ND filters to cut down the light entering the camera. The particular ones that I used were the Lee Big Stopper 10 stop, and a couple of Hitech 2 stops graduated ND. YOU WILL NEED TO USE ND FILTER, or some other type of light blocking device, or even A PROPER SOLAR FILTER. OTHERWISE, YOU COULD RISK DAMAGING YOUR CAMERA SENSOR WITH SUCH BRIGHT LIGHT, EVEN WITH F/22 ISO 100 1/8000S!!

   

This is my GX7 with the 100-300mm and the multiple ND filters that I attached to get a reasonable exposure setting on my camera. Hardcore stuff, isn't it? :p

  
I zoomed all the way to 300mm(that's 600mm full frame) using the GX7, and I sadly had to shoot JPEG because I need to use the 2x and 4x digital teleconverter, which unfortunately only available in JPEG. If your lens can get longer than 600mm eq, you won't need to shoot in JPEG. Always shoot RAW for situations like this!
  

Technique

Tripod! ND Filters! Ultra long telephoto lens! You can still skip the tripod if you feel ballsy, but don't skip on the other two when shooting solar eclipse!
  
Actually, there's not a lot of technique being involved here, it's all just about getting the right exposure and nailing the focus. I use single AF on the GX7 and it worked well. You just have to point the AF point to the contrasty edge of the sun's periphery to get a lock on the sun.
  
Composition wise, fill the frame. Crop if you need too, use digital tele-converter if you must, get as close as possible to filling the frame. Afterwards, you can always fill the frame with negative space later on in the post, because right now you want to "savor" as much of the sun to fill up your sensor, so you won't regret it later.
  
Keep in mind, the earth is rotating, so you'll see the sun "moves" from the east to the west slowly(in fact it's the earth that rotates). This effect gets very pronounced especially when you are shooting with an ultra long telephoto lens. Therefore, be ready to follow the sun and catch it in your composition. Lock your camera down in a tripod, and move the head slowly everytime the sun is at the edge of your frame.
  
Post processing, add some contrast and clarity to the file until you can clearly see the sun spots. The sun spots are the black spots on the sun's surface. At this point you are shooting at small aperture and you will risk showing dust on the sensor, and both dust spots and sun spots look almost the same. The only way to know which one is which, is by shooting the sun multiple times while changing the framing a little bit. If the spots are moving as you move the framing, then they are the sun spots. If they don't move, they're the dust spots, clean them using clone tool.
  

How to improve?

This is one of the situation where gear really matters. I really wish I have the highest megapixel count that I can have, I really wish I have longer lens, I really wish my ND filters aren't eating a bit of the sharpness, gear gear, gear, gear! Laugh at me, call me gear nerds, but you're shooting at the limits of what our cameras can do, and at this point gear does matter.
  
I also wish I was shooting this from the city where I could see total eclipse instead of the partial eclipse that I encountered in my city. But if I did so, I'll have to make a bet that the weather on that particular city will be cloud free at that time. I was about to make the call and go to Palembang city so I can get the total eclipse from there, but fortunately I made the right choice by staying here because it was super cloudy during the eclipse day.
  
I could improve the composition a bit by adding a foreground which will be silhouetted for sure, like the first photo on this post where I put leaves and branches of a tree as my foreground. Unfortunately, as the sun went higher and higher, I need to get closer to the tree to get the leaves and branches as my foreground, and if I focus on the foreground, the sun will just turn into a giant white blob that doesn't look like an eclipse. I tried focusing to the sun, and the foreground just disappeared into a messy grey mist in front of the sun. So it didn't work at that time, but I could try with branches or leaves that are more far away. Or I could probably use a faraway building's rooftop too.
  
That's all for today's post. I hope you enjoy this post, and stay tune for more! Cheers and God bless you!
   

How I Shoot It #5: Low-Key Stuffed Animal, Strobist

Hello everyone, today I'm back with a new "How I Shoot It" post to share my techniques on shooting off camera flash with small products indoor. The photo that I used today is a photo of small stuffed animal/plush toy that I have that's lying around in my house. On this post, we will be exploring my take on off camera flash/strobist shooting technique that was very popularized by David Hobby. You can check out http://strobist.blogspot.com for more info on that.
  
Anyway, here is the photo for today's post.
  

  
This picture of the plush toy was taken sometime around 2015, using either the GX7 or the GX8 (I can't remember, sorry). This photo is all about small product photography, indoor(studio), with off camera flash technique. So, pay attention if this is what you'll need to shoot.
   

Let's analyze this photo

Camera Settings Mumbo Jumbo

f/5.6, 1/250s, ISO 200. Lens was at 25mm for sure (that's 35mm in APS-C, or 50mm in full frame). Make sure that if you shoot the picture without the flash turned on, all is black and dark. This is the most important key-point in shooting low key photographs.
  

Lighting Mumbo Jumbo

There are two lights that were being used in this photo, the first one, a YN510EX was the main light on upper-left of the camera, the other was behind the subject. The main light was modified using Rogue FlashBender, and the back light is gelled using some red transparency paper.
   
The main light is rated at 1/32 power, and the back light is rated at around 1/64 power. I'm placing the lights fairly close to the subject, and the closer the light is to the subject, the more light it will put to the subject. Inverse square law, guys! You can't run from physics, ha! Balance the power as needed, adjust until the subject is perfectly exposed.
   
All flashes were zoomed moderately to 50mm, even the main light which is diffused using the FlashBender, so that it's easier to feather the light.
  

Technique

The main light was handheld using my left hand, while my right hand held the camera. This is how I shoot with single off camera flash most of the time by the way, all handheld and I avoid using light stand whenever possible, to help with run-and-gun situation. FlashBender isn't the softest light modifier in the world, but it's the easiest one to use for run-and-gun situations. And for this small product photography, it's large enough that it mimics the characteristic of a large soft box for small subjects. The plush toy is barely larger than the FlashBender, which makes the FlashBender very soft relative to this plush toy. And at this distance, with the inverse square law, it gets even softer for this close-range light setup.
  
Aim the main light by slowly moving it around, changing its angle ever-so-slightly all the time, until the main light isn't hitting your surrounding. This is very important, since you don't want the main light to bounce from any walls from your room. Hence, make sure the distance between the subject and the nearest wall is as far as possible!
   
For the back light, just place it on a surface behind the subject and hide it so that it won't show on your frame. Keep it zoomed in or gobo-ed so that it's not causing unnecessary flares on your frame, unless you intentionally want the flare, your call. The back light will help to separate the edges of your subject from the dark background by creating some sort of rim light. I personally love this rimmed light look on the subject, it's just so pleasing in my opinion.
 
Composition wise, fill the frame or add as much negative space as possible, your call. Rule of thirds will help if you decide to add negative space. Don't clip any part of the subject, unless you intentionally want to do so. Look around for the shadow, and decide if you need to cut the shadow in the frame, or just let them all be in the frame to add some tension to your picture.
 

Post Processing

Not much, with speedlights for lighting, you can pop the photo significantly that it doesn't require anything to post process. I further popped the photo by adding slight contrast, adding just around +20 clarity, and a slight vibrance to the photo in Lightroom. I also added a little bit of noise reduction to make sure that my black-low-key area isn't grainy. That's all.
 

How to Improve?

I was shooting this photo in my bedroom. It's an okay sized room, but the walls are quite close to each other and to my subject. I struggled so much to avoid light bouncing all over the frame, so I have to keep moving the main light(FlashBender'ed speedlight)'s angle a few times while shooting until I found that one perfect moment where there's no bounced light on the photo.
 
I could definitely shoot in a larger room, and be free of such trouble. And thus making it faster for me to shoot and saving me from a lot of unused frames.
 
Apart from that, I am quite happy with this photo as of right now. If you have any suggestion on how to make this photo better, let me know in the comment section below.
 
That's all for today's "How I Shoot It" post, I hope this post is useful for you, and please leave any comments if you have questions or things to say. Cheers and God bless you :)

How I Shoot It #4: Northern Light, Aurora Borealis - Aurora Photography

Hello everyone, welcome back to this series of "How I Shoot It". Today, I want to share one of the most difficult photos that I ever take: The Northern Light or Aurora Borealis. Here's the photo:
  

 

  
This picture of Aurora Borealis was taken back in 2013 when I was still using my old trustee Canon EOS 650D. This was my pre Micro Four Thirds era, and this was back in the time where I just started to shoot RAW. Just for your information, I shoot RAW 100% these days, I never shoot JPEG unless I know what I'm doing.
  
The photo was taken at Tromso, Norway. This was my lucky day because we've been waiting for the Northern Light to show up for two days.
 
The concept of this photo is simply just a landscape photo with added layer from the Aurora Borealis, which is essentially Aurora Photography in its simplest form. As with many landscape photo in general, wide-angle focal length is more preferred, and this was no exception.
 

Mechanics of the Photo

Camera Setting

This was shot using Canon EOS 650D, with Tokina 12-24mm f/4 DX lens which I really love. I shoot at 12mm, f/4, ISO 1600, for as long as 30 seconds. Tripod is a must, so not bringing one for this kind of shot is simply killing yourself. Remember to shoot in RAW, this is the kind of picture that requires a lot of pushing/pulling in the post-processing that's simply cannot be done in JPEG. I didn't meter the shot at all, which means I'm guessing the exposure without knowing if it was right or wrong, and all is done in Manual mode (M dial).
  
The white balance goes really crazy with my old 650D, and that is another reason why I shoot RAW. The manual white balance isn't spot on, there is no way to shoot in Kelvin, there's no way to specifically adjust tint/hue separately, and the Auto WB is just pretty much garbage in that camera. If you want to get your WB as close as possible, set the WB to as low as possible (2500K).
 

Technique

Composition wise, rule of thirds is your safest bet. I chose the mountain as my foreground, the Aurora Borealis as my background, and the starry night sky as my background. It's not the best, but it's passable. We didn't scout for the location and just go look for a place outskirt of the town, so we had to make due with whatever composition that was present at that time.
  
As with all wide-angle lens, you'll have to really work yourself to find the composition that you like. On the other hand, you'll have to include at least 2/3 of your frame in Aurora photography for the sky so that the Aurora will stand out in the photograph. The composition rarely works if you have less than 2/3 of the frame for the sky/Aurora. Focal length, again, is also important, anything that's tighter than 24mm on full frame won't easily work, although you can still use it.
  
As I mentioned before, tripod is a must for a 30 second shot. Find a good sturdy tripod that won't shake easily during long exposure shot like this. Your average 20 bucks Excell or Velbon vacation tripod won't cut it, get a nice tripod with good ball-head for the ultimate stability and flexibility. But the shooting session itself shouldn't be your only concern; we spent more time and resource to prepare for the Aurora hunt itself.
  
First, find the country where you want to shoot the Aurora at. Norway has a nice city called Tromso, which was where I shoot this picture, and it's one of a few cities that are actually very close to the actual north pole, which makes it ideal for Aurora photography since Aurora tend to spawn closer to north pole. I believe Finland, Canada, Alaska(US), and some other parts in the world do have similar accessible location that has some Aurora activity.
 
The best time to see Aurora Borealis is around fall or winter on the northern hemisphere of the earth. It will be very active from November to around February. So plan your traveling date accordingly.
 
Before you do the actual shoot, which is usually after the sun set, make sure you scout for the best location on the morning or noon. Keep in mind, during that time, the sun will only available for a few hours everyday. Usually, Aurora photography requires as little ambient light as possible for the Aurora to really shine, but you can get slightly more creative and shoot where there is some ambient light(city light, house light), and blend the exposures. And also take into account the effect of moon light if there's moon present on the night sky. Moon will help to lit the ground, but it will also make stars disappear from the night sky.

The weather will be crazy cold, so dress accordingly, and protect your gear. Bring extra batteries, because in cold weather the battery will die faster. Keep your extra batteries in the pocket, so that they'll stay a bit warmer. Before you actually shoot with your camera, get the camera to the same ambient temperature so that the sensor is cooler and will produce less noise in high ISO.
  

Post Processing

I used Canon Digital Photo Professional app to process the RAW files. This was the days when I haven't use Lightroom yet. I mainly raise the shadow a whole lot in the picture, keep the highlight from blowing out, and use some noise reduction tool to kill the noise at this long-exposure-low-light-high-ISO shot. I manually adjusted the white balance until the color looks good. I don't really remember the setting, but I'm pretty sure it's around 2500K.
 
Shooting RAW is the key here as I mentioned before. If I shot this picture using JPEG, definitely the mountain will lose detail when I raise the shadow, and the highlight can't be controlled which translates to blown-out-overly-bright Aurora. Also the WB can't be corrected with JPEG, and that will cause problems.
  

How To Improve?

As I mentioned before, I didn't really scout for a good location due to the constraint of my travel, so I couldn't get a desired landscape that I want to shoot. If I researched better during the daytime to find the desired landscape, I will probably be able to improve the photo.

My Tokina 12mm isn't as wide as I want it to be, but it was the widest lens that I had at the time. I will probably use my MFT 7mm lens instead right now, or rent/buy a very wide fish eye lens. I couldn't capture as much things in the frame, and it really frustrated me.

I could improve the photo also by adding another element in the shoot, like a person or something. Asking someone to stand still for 30 seconds is impossible, so I would probably use a very low power flash to lit the person and use second curtain sync to get the best result.

I could also go another route and add another landscape element such as the view of a whole city from above shot from a higher ground. I will probably mess up the exposure of the city because 30 seconds exposure will definitely blow out city lights, so if I were to shoot this picture again with the city light included, I will utilize exposure blending technique. That means, I will shoot two different exposures of the same frame and later combine them together using Photoshop or Gimp.

That's all for today's How I Shoot It post, I hope you find this post useful. Until next time, good luck, and keep shooting! God bless you :)

How I Shoot It #3: Flaming Hot Ice Cream

Hello all, today I want to post another "How I Shoot It" material here. This time, it's somewhat a food photograhy-ish kind of photo, but it's actually more of a art-ish kind of photo. It's a photo of a flaming ice cream that you can probably find in Japanese Tepanyaki styled restaurant. I shot this around September 2015, using my Olympus E-PL6. Here's the photo:
 

 

  

The concept here is just an artsy kind of photo, utilizing shallow depth of field to soften the background and using relatively low key exposure to get rid of the room's ambient. The key here is to have a relatively still ice cream while having the flame burning with slight movement blur. A short telephoto lens was used as a crucial gear that can help to achieve shallower depth of field.

 

Technical Mumbo Jumbo

Camera Setting

I shot this picture using the already-sold Olympus PEN E-PL6, using the legendary M. Zuiko 45mm f/1.8 lens (90mm equivalent). This was shot at f/2.0, shutter speed of around 1/100, and ISO 3200. This was shot using Aperture Priority mode but with the spot metering on the ice cream/flame, so that the background is underexposed. This shot was taken indoor in a restaurant on a very dim lighting, so high ISO is a must.

  

Technique

 There's not a lot of technique here, it's all just a matter of framing the shot. The shutter speed was deliberately chosen at 1/100 sec because I could steadily handhold it to get the ice cream to look very still, while the flame could still move and have some deliberate movement blur.

  

The composition is just straight forward rule of thirds, with the ice cream slightly on the camera lower right, right where the rule of thirds guidelines crossed at that particular point. I filled the frame with the flame, and because it was very difficult to predict where the flame will move, I just shot a whole bunch of frames and pick the one where the flame looks the best.

  

How to Improve?

I could use off camera flash technique to further enhance the low-key feel of the image, and to get sharper ice cream. It will probably cause the flame to look washed out, but I haven't tried it yet, so I can't really comment on that.

  

I could also use a longer lens like the 75mm(150mm equivalent) to get shallower depth of field, but at the risk of having the ice cream only partially in focus. But the 75mm lens will definitely help to remove more background elements that are distracting.

  

Using a shorter focal length won't really give any benefit to the picture, it will introduce more background which could be distracting. The point here is to get rid of the distraction as much as you can. However, if you feel like the background should be included in the shot, that's entirely your artistic choice.

 

Processing wise, I don't do much on this picture. I did raise the shadow to get the ice cream to a more proper exposure, while I reduced the highlight to slightly tame the flame exposure. Noise reduction was necessary to reduce the grain on ISO 3200. But other than that, it pretty much looks almost like straight OOC.

 

That's all for today's "How I Shoot It" post. I hope you find this post to be helpful. Please stay tune for more posts like this in the future. In the meantime, good luck, happy shooting, and God bless you!

  

How I Shoot It #2: Ultra Wide Urban Street Photograph

Hello all, today I want to share another photo for the "How I Shoot It" series that I started a few weeks ago. The first post of the series was posted on my other blog: bejo-photography.blogspot.co.id if you want to check it out. The purpose of this series is to share the techniques, settings, and all behind-the-scenes stuffs that were involved to create some of my photos in the series, so that you can implement those aspects in similar shots.
  
Today, the photo that I want to share is a street photograph of a lady crossing the street in Ginza, Tokyo. This was taken sometime in December 2014, which means I was already equipped with Micro Four Thirds gear and no longer shooting with Canon.
  

  
The concept of this picture is just a straight forward street photography in an urban setting, but with a little twist, so that it doesn't look similar to other street photographs. As people are used with 35mm or 50mm focal length for street photography, they are quickly becoming a cliche. So I used a 14mm equivalent focal length instead, which is more suited for landscape, and tried to come up with something new and original for this genre.
 

How Did I Shoot It?

Camera Setting

I shot this picture using my old trusty Olympus PEN E-PL6 that I already sold. The lens that I used was the Panasonic 7-14mm f/4.0. This was shot wide open at f/4.0, at the widest 7mm focal length (14mm equivalent), at ISO 200, on aperture priority. The camera chose 1/500sec for the shutter speed, as dictated by the metering system that I used at the time.
 
The metering mode was set to spot metering, right in the middle of the camera. So naturally, it metered at the lady wearing the red coat, which resulted in her being in the right exposure and everything else was slightly overexposed. FYI, I spot meter almost 100% of the time these days, it just works wonderfully for portrait, although it doesn't work as well in landscape.
 

Technique

As with any street photography, the most important thing to remember is to be at the exact right place just before the subject arrives. Choose your "backdrop" first, then wait for your "prey" to walk into your "backdrop".

For this photo, my "backdrop" is simply the Ginza road, stretching as long as my line of sight, and my "prey" is the lady wearing the red coat. I saw her walking from far away, and I was in the middle of the road when I saw her approaching and crossing the road. I quickly positioned myself at the center of the crosswalk right across from her, and waited until she walked right in the middle of her crosswalk.

The 7mm lens (14mm equivalent) is an important part of the image, as street photographs are usually shot at 35mm equivalent or 50mm equivalent. It really brings a lot of unique characters to the picture that you don't usually see in street photographs.

Keep in mind: with ultra-wide-angle(UWA) lens, you have to be very careful with how you position the camera. Any slight tilt will get exaggerated greatly on UWA, and keeping the vertical lines under control requires raising/lowering the camera to get them all as correct as possible. Depth of field is going to be very wide, even on larger aperture; it's the nature of UWA. Also, the foreground will always look large and the background will always look small with UWA due to its perspective distortion, so you have to compose the picture carefully. One more thing, you'll really have to be VERY close to your subject if you want your subject to fill the frame; not just close, but really at his/her personal space!
 
However, these problems shouldn't discourage you, because you can treat it to your advantage.
 
First, I tilted the camera just a little to look up from the hip level, so that the vertical lines start to tilt a little bit, just to artistically add some "surreal" feel to the picture, which I couldn't achieve if I was shooting all straight and distortion free.
 
Second, I need the wide depth of field to show the urban environment of the Ginza street, so that it can be more recognizable; if I blur the background, the element of the environment won't get too recognizable and I don't want that. This of course made separating the subject from the background more difficult, but that's when I was being pushed to become creative.
 
Third, I shot her close enough (5 meters approximately from the subject), but not that close because I want a lot of space around her. I could fill the frame with her and make her really stand out from the background, but I want her to almost become a part of the scene without under-powering her presence as a subject too much. I was pretty lucky because there was no one else on the scene that was on the same parallel-plane as her from where I stand. If there was someone else in the same distance from my camera to her in the frame, that person will stand-out too and it could ruin everything.

How To Improve?

The picture that I shot isn't exactly perfect as I had in mind. I had to crop, and even it wasn't enough; see the white umbrella on the lower-right of the frame? The lighting was pretty flat due to the cloudy day, and the sky wasn't interesting at the time. I would love to take this picture again under sunset/sunrise sky with just enough clouds to make the sky interesting.

The focal length that I chose was near ideal. I would love to try to use fish-eye sometimes to artistically add more interesting visual elements to the picture and further enhance the surreal-feel of the picture.

If I shot this with a 35mm equivalent lens, I could blur the background and make the subject stand out significantly, but I'll have to sacrifice the Ginza road stretching to the horizon, and turn it simply into a bokeh; it's simply not what I want.

Processing wise, I cropped the image slightly to center the subject right in the middle of the frame. I added just a hint of contrast, raised a bit of shadow to show more detail in the buildings and on the people, and lower a bit of highlight to expose for the sky, and add just a slight clarity to enhance some mid-tones in the picture. Honestly, it looks so much better in black and white, but I thought the red coat that the lady wore really needs to be shown in color, as it lose so much "power" in black and white.

That's all for this "How I Shoot It" post, I hope you find this post to be helpful for you. If you have any question or anything in mind, please comment below and I'll do my best to get back at you. Until next time, good luck and God bless you :)