ESTABLISHED 2010 - Beyond The Campfire was created to encourage readers to explore the great outdoors and to observe it close up. Get out and take a hike, go fishing or canoeing, or simply stretch out on a blanket under a summer sky...and take your camera along. We'll talk about combining outdoor activities with photography. We'll look at everything from improving your understanding of the basics of photography to more advanced techniques including things like how to see photographically and capturing the light. We'll explore the night sky, location shoots, using off camera speedlights along with nature and landscape. Grab your camera...strap on your hiking boots...and join me. I think you will enjoy the adventure.

Sunday, February 25, 2018

Creating Time Lapse Videos - Kentucky Skies

We've all been fascinated by those amazing time lapse videos made by professional storm chasers and photographers alike. I have from time to time created a few rather ordinary time lapse videos using software that was not particularly suited for it. Using that other software was a time consuming process characterized by trial and error, mostly error, in coming up with a workable video. Even so it was fun to do and I learned a great deal about how to make videos of that nature.


Today, I now have some software, ProShow Producer, that makes it much easier to create interesting an exciting time lapse videos rather quickly. Lets take a look at the process.

First of all, to create a time lapse video you need to capture a series of images at a set interval spaced over a specified amount of time. The best way to do this is to use what is called an Intervalometer. An Intervalometer is a device you connect to your camera that allows you take a series of images without having to manually release the shutter each time.

There are a variety of them available designed to fit all makes of cameras and they cost anywhere from under $30.00 to well over $150.00. I purchased two of them from Aputure a few years ago, each costing under $30.00, one for my Sony A65 camera and one for my Nikon D3200. They are both identical except for the connector, and they both work very well.

They all fundamentally work the same way where you set a time delay between shots set to run for a specified number of shots at a specific interval. There are two ways to use them to make the exposure. One is to set your camera on Manual and your shutter speed to the Bulb setting. You then use the Intervalometer to control the exposure and the time interval between each capture. This setup works well for night time photography where long exposures are required. The other way is to allow your camera to set the exposure like you would for an normal photograph, but you simply set the interval between each capture. This works well for capturing time lapse of the sky.


To capture a time lapse sequence you will want to setup your intervalometer interval to capture an image at least every 5 seconds. This can vary depending on just how quickly you want the video to move, but something around 5 to 7 seconds between captures should work well.

You also want to capture at least 100 images, 200 or even 300 would work better and will give you a time lapse video that runs for an extended time. 100 images will give you a few seconds of time lapse.

Setup your camera to cover a greater extent of the sky with just a small line of the ground to act as an anchor. Stormy skies with lots of texture work very well, but summer blue sky and fluffy white clouds also work well. Actually you can time lapse just about anything that has movement, it is just a matter of getting the correct setup and being there.

After you capture the 200 or so images, you will want to download them to your computer. Once they are downloaded, you can do a mass processing to tweak the images. In Photoshop or Elements there is an option called Process Multiple Files. This allows you to make some basic edits that apply to all of the images, and then load those images to a separate file. This edited file is the one you will want to use.

ProShow Producer makes it very easy to create a time lapse. The easiest way to do this is first load the first image by itself into the timeline. Once it is loaded into the timeline you will want to adjust the transition timer to 0.0 and the Slide timer to 0.07 of a second.


I tried different timer settings and 0.07 seems to work the best. Next, you can select all the other 199 images and paste them into the next slide position. ProShow will automatically insert them into the correct location and it will also pickup the timer settings from the first slide. Now you have 200 images all linked together using the same settings.


From here it is simply a matter of creating the actual program. You can if you want to, add a beginning introduction slide and an ending exit slide, but it is not necessary. I rendered the program as an MP4 format slide show at 720 resolution at 30 FPS. It took a few minutes for it to complete. This completed video file can then be used or inserted into another full production program when you are ready for it. The attached time lapsed video is the results...rather fun and easy to create.





Saturday, February 24, 2018

Adventure Photography Series - The Moving Waters of Shanty Hollow

Shanty Hollow Lake is one of my favorite places. Filled with an abundance of outdoor adventure opportunities, it is a great place to spend a few hours or a full day. As part of the Adventure Photography series, I recently spent a rare spring-like February day hiking the trails and photographing the streams and waterfalls that can be discovered here. Please enjoy this second in the Shanty Hollow adventure series; Photographing the Moving Waters of Shanty Hollow.



Friday, February 9, 2018

Adventure Photography Video Series - Chasing Sandhill Cranes

Spent the better part of a cold blustery full day and then a little more photographing Sandhill Cranes in the Lucas area on Barren River Lake. Sandhills are amazing birds that migrate through Kentucky where about 3000 to 4000 spend the winter roosting on the mud flats and feeding in the corn stubble and soybean fields.

Producing this video was a challenging project. Although the Sandhills are exciting to observe, they tend to shy away from people making it difficult to get in close enough to capture interesting behavioral activity. Fortunately, they will a times land near enough to side road where you can use your vehicle as a blind and get some shots.

Please enjoy the video and provide some feedback so I can improve the production process.




Saturday, February 3, 2018

The Power of Tonal Values

Ever heard of the Zone System? If not it is an exposure method championed by Ansel Adams where you can assign different tonal values to the scene you are photographing. Those values run from completely black to completely white with varying degrees of gray spaced between. In the middle is the neutral middle toned gray value.


In this post we're not going to become too deeply involved about how to use the Zone System, but we are going to look at how and why understanding the Power of Tonal Values is important.

First of all, this graduated scale applies to all colors and every color when applied through its full spectrum will have a middle tone value. To keep things simple we're going to look at only the gray scale, but keep in mind the principles apply to all colors.


What your camera's metering wants to do is give you an average of the light it detects. It doesn't matter if you use a full matrix metering or single spot metering. The results are going to be an average of all the tones and brightness values it see's. Matrix metering does a pretty good job of getting the overall exposure correct, but it is still just an average. So if you point your camera at a black wall the camera will want to make that black wall appear a middle toned gray. Point it toward a white wall, and again it will shift the exposure so it appears to become gray. That is why when we take pictures of snow, where the snow is dominant, it can appear to be gray.

I use matrix metering most of the time simply because it does a pretty good job of averaging out the exposure, however I will use spot metering under certain situations. Spot metering allows for metering a single small area and using that reading as the basis for setting your exposure. A good example of this is to meter a models face when there is a great deal of back light. (Peoples faces do have different tonal values of course depending on their complexion due to their race or lifestyle.) A bright back light can confuse matrix metering into thinking it needs to shift the exposure down to turn it into that middle toned gray. This will cause the models face to become much darker than it actually is. By metering on her face, locking the exposure in based on that middle tone, the camera will ignore the back light and expose for her complexion.


Neutral tones also contribute to landscapes. A good landscape image especially a black and white image, will possess a range of tonal values from almost pure white to almost full black. When the scene contains a variety of tonal values, matrix metering works pretty well to capture the full range of values. Sometimes in post processing you can enhance a certain value such as bright or dark areas to add a higher degree of  tonal complexity to your image. Doing so gives the image a great deal more depth.


Notice the image above. In this picture you will find tonal ranges that run the full spectrum from almost white to black with just about every tone of gray between. A slight tweak in Photoshop helped to enhance the bright areas, and bring life to the various middle values. When viewed as a larger image you can easily see how it has a great deal of depth to it. This is how you use the power of tonal values to its fullest. Knowing how your camera will react to the available light, will give you a greater ability to create images with depth.

When your subject has a dominant tonal value like a snow scene, you must always expose for the brightest area. If you simply allow you camera's metering to do what it wants, it will always give you a middle toned value, but you can compensate for that by using the Exposure Compensation button on your camera. That is the +/- button most often located on the top or on the back of your camera This allows you to tell your camera to add light or remove light from the exposure it wants to use. Take snow for instance. If your scene is dominated by the snow, your camera will want to make it look grayer than we want. To correct for this, simply move the +/- setting into the + side. The +/- settings are broken down usually into 1/3rd stop values like 0.3 stop, 0.7 stop, 1.0 full stop all the way to as much as 3.0 stops brighter or darker. How much to move it depends on the situation and requires a bit of experimentation. Sometimes + 0.3 is all you need, sometimes +1.3 is required. What you have to do is to avoid over exposing the snow...a little gray is okay because snow does have texture and we do not want to blow it out.


The photo above demonstrates this idea pretty well. There is a tinge of gray in the snowy areas because there is texture filled with shadows and exposed material across the snow, but the snow itself appears white. Again this image contains a full range of tonal values.

There are situations where an object or scene contains a splash of white while the rest is mostly middle toned values or darker. If  you simply expose for the darker areas, that white splash can often be blown out. In that case, you can use the exposure compensation in the opposite direction and drop it into the minus side, something like -0.3. This will slightly darken the middle values, but will keep the white splash from being blown out.


This color image of Sandhill Cranes is a good example of using the minus compensation value. Of course this was all preset before the birds took flight. The background was a bit darker than middle value, so I wanted it to look that way, but the birds were a middle toned gray, yet they have some white splash across their wings and under their chin. By presetting the exposure with a minus compensation, I was able to retain a full range of tonal values. Much of this comes with experience and experimentation...sometimes a good guess helps as well.

When there is a strong mix of light and dark values in a scene, there are times when employing a slight reduction in light will work to your advantage. The next image contains a wide mix of very bright and rather dark areas. If we are not careful, the darker areas will fool your metering into thinking it needs to brighten the exposure more than it should. This can often result in blown out light areas. So by employing a slight minus compensation value something like -0.3, you can still retain detail in the dark and light tones without blowing out the white areas. Also, remember shadows, either cast or deflected, are good on snow. They add detail and form to what can often look rather flat. A little gray is okay because it helps to define texture in snow. All you need is an illusion of white...almost white...with a tonal value slightly grayer than pure white to make snow look great.


There is no real cut and dried method to using tonal values in your photography, it is important however to understand the principle and then applying it to your photography. Sometimes we guess right and sometimes we don't, but to simply allow your camera to do what it wants to do all the time will result in average photographs. To capture the world in such a way as to bring depth and strength to the composition, employ the power of tonal values to what you are doing.