How to Take Good Photos for Under $1,000

Yesterday was a big family Christmas-type day. We picked out our tree, hung the lights, and visited Santa. Usually we wait in line to see Santa, but on this day he was taking a break, helping to run the merry-go-round. My son and his friend were finishing up their ride when they spotted him. He came over to do the Santa thing. And suddenly I realized that Santa was happening right now, whether I was ready or not.

But I was ready.

I posted the photos that evening, and a few friends asked, in a flattering and kind way, how I always get such nice shots. And the answer is not a new one, but as I replied, I realized that it is a valuable one to repeat.

Christmas is coming. Here’s how to take some good photos.

Buy a DSLR

Step one is to put your phone away. Step two is to, for the time being, ignore all the excitement about mirrorless cameras. There are some great ones, but this is my advice, and I use an SLR.

Buy literally any DSLR. The cheapest ones you can get these days are crazy good. There’s the Canon Rebel line, and the Nikon D3200. Heck, buy a used one from a couple of years ago.

Buy the body only. The kit lens that comes with these inexpensive SLRs is not worth the plastic it’s stamped out of. If your inexpensive DSLR is not available without a lens, buy it and literally throw away the lens. Into a landfill. Directly onto endangered waterfowl. I’m serious.

You just spent $400 or so. I’ve bought many pocket cameras that cost more.

Buy a “Fast 50”

The oldest advice about photography is still the best. A “fast 50” is the cheapest, best lens. On your inexpensive DSLR, 50mm is a portrait lens, which means it’s good for taking pictures of people—which are the only pictures anyone cares about.

• Canon’s 50mm f/1.8 is little more than $100. It’s made of cheap plastic on the outside, but on the inside it’s made of pure photolookbetterium.

• Nikon’s 50mm f/1.8 is a little more expensive, but its ancestry traces back to some of the best stills lenses ever made.

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Use Aperture Priority Mode and Shoot Wide Open

You just bought a lens with a large maximum aperture. That means that the little diaphragm in your lens can “open up” wider than most other lenses, letting in more light. So use it—shoot in Aperture Priority mode, and set your aperture to the smallest possible number. In the case of the above lenses, that’s 1.8.

Shooting wide-open will result in two things: First, you can shoot in lower light, and even capture fast motion like kids on a carousel. Second, you’ll get that wonderful shallow depth of field that mushes busy backgrounds into pleasing blobs of light.

Use Auto ISO

Today’s DSLRs can produce usable images at very high ISOs. The higher the ISO, the less light you need. High IOS images are more noisy, but noise is preferable to motion blur.

By letting your camera choose your ISO for you, and enforcing a wide-open f-stop using Aperture Priority mode, you’re instructing your camera to choose an ISO that will get you an acceptably fast shutter speed for whatever lighting conditions you face.

Manually Set Your Focus Points

The printed manual for your camera will be confusing and mostly useless, but do flip through it to find the part about controlling what part of the frame the camera will try to focus on. With this new shallow depth of field you’re enjoying, you can no longer allow the camera to guess at what to focus on, nor can you center-focus, half-press the shutter, and re-frame. You’re now like Maverick trying to get missile lock — do not push that button until the little box blinks on your kid’s eyeball.

Shoot Raw

Shooting raw gives you two wonderful gifts: It opens up a world of processing opportunities for your photos, which is great. But it also greatly limits the amount of futzing you can/must do with the camera itself. You can shoot all night with the wrong white balance, and it doesn’t matter. You don’t have to choose noise reduction settings, or “picture modes.” Just capture moments. Do that other stuff later.

Do That Other Stuff Later

Post-process your photos using Adobe Lightroom. Lightroom is about $100, and worth every penny and more.

In Lightroom, you’ll both organize and process your photos. If you don’t do either of these things, your photos won’t be good. Failing to process your photos means they’ll look mediocre. Failing to organize your photos means that no one will ever see them.

Shoot A Ton of Shots Like a Crazy Person

Yesterday I shot 367 photos. When I got home, I immediately deleted 147 of those. I wound up selecting 11 to share with friends.

Being selective like this is the only way to fool your friends into thinking you’re a great photographer. To support your new “spray and pray” method of shooting, you’ll want a couple of big memory cards, which will cost you about $30 each.

Use my Lightroom Presets

When I said that failing to process your shots means they’ll look mediocre, you might have panicked a little. That’s OK, processing raw photos to look their best is a deep subject. Lightroom’s “develop” controls are powerful, but daunting.

So don’t use them. Do this instead:

My Lightroom presets make developing your shots a “see and react” operation, instead of requiring you to be an expert.

You just spent the best $50 of your photographic life. #marketing

Get Backblaze

Now that you’re shooting several gigabytes every time you pick up your camera, you’re going to accumulate a frightening amount of data. Frightening because the drive in your computer will fail someday — one of those things that’s not an if, it’s a when. A Time Machine or other local backup is good. An off-site backup is also necessary, in case of blimp attack.

Backblaze is a good choice for photographers because it backs up connected drives, gives you unlimited storage, and has fast upload speeds. Just install it and forget about it.

You just spent $50 for a year of Backblaze.

Actually do this.

Now that you’ve bought all this stuff, the only thing that remains is the habit of actually doing this stuff. Your iPhone camera is damnably good. Good enough that often you’ll be tempted not to schlep your big, heavy DSLR. If you succumb to this temptation, we’re right back to terrible photos, so here’s how to make sure you bring that big mirror-box with you wherever you go: buy a sling-style camera bag. I like the Slingshot series from Lowepro. You wear it across your back, and when you need to shoot, you flip it around to your chest, where the flap with your camera opens easily. It’s super handy, only a little dorky, and can actually be the difference between getting a shot and not.

You just spent $60.

Share!

Now it’s time to share your shots. Here are some rules of thumb:

• Flickr is where you share flower photos with strangers. Period.

• Facebook is, sadly, where real humans that you know will see, and engage with, your photos. Being humans, they are only interested in pictures of other humans. Never put a picture of the Eiffel Tower on Facebook. Only pictures of people.

Boom.

I’m sure you’ve been tempted to buy a camera that costs around $1,000, but the above items, which total well under a grand, will serve you better — and they comprise a real system for making, organizing, and sharing better photos.

Welcome to the world of people complimenting your photography by asking you what kind of camera you use!

Update 2014-05-04

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Update 2020-11-12

This article needs an update. There’s plenty about it that’s still spot-on, but mirrorless has arrived, even if it still blows the titular price-point out of the water.

“Pixar’s 22 Rules of Story,” Analyzed

Back in 2011, a Emma Coats tweeted a series of “story basics” she absorbed and distilled during her tenure as a story artist at Pixar. These tweets were aggregated by many bloggers, who tended to refer to them as “pixar story rules,” even though they were never represented by Coats as “rules,” or “Pixar’s.”

I found Emma’s tweets insightful and useful (especially when rendered in Lego). As with any pithy, tweet-sized aphorisms, they were more interesting for the thoughts they spurred in the reader than as hard and fast “rules” on their own (as Emma was always quick to point out herself). To me, what was most valuable about these observations was what happened inside my head when I read them.

Another Pixar employee, Stephan Bugaj (a good friend who consulted on the design of Slugline), would seem to agree, as he blogged his analyses of each of the rules-that-aren’t-rules. He recently completed the series of 22 posts, and has compiled them all into a PDF e-book, which you can download free from his site.

Pixar’s cultural commitment to storytelling is something special, and any window into it is gold. But in the same way that Emma’s tweets were her own, Stephan’s analysis is all him—and it’s definitely worth a read.

Thanksgiving Sale at the Prolost Store

I love Thanksgiving, because a) food, and b) my family is the good kind of crazy.

So take advantage of my good spirits and save 30% on everything at the Prolost Store! Even the free stuff.

• That means Prolost Boardo, the badest-ass way of making an animated storyboard, is only $17.50 instead of the usual $24.99.
• The Prolost Lightroom Presets are only $14.00 instead of $19.99.
• And Prolost Burns, which makes easy work of the famous Ken Burns effect, is a ludicrous $2.80, instead of the egregious regular price of $3.99.
• The DV Rebel Tools and Prolost Stereo Levels—hold on, lemme, check. Yep, still free.

Just use the coupon code CANBERRY when you check out. The sale lasts through Monday, because it makes me laugh when people say “cyber.”

Happy Holidays!

The Perils of Home Theater

I love movies, and have always wanted a great home theater. This year I decided to build one. It’s been a daunting, exciting, and ultimately rewarding process. I’ve wanted to write about the experience of researching and installing this combination studio and theater, but I honestly haven’t known where to start.

Not knowing where to begin is such a classic form of procrastination that I’ve decide to skip “beginning” entirely. Instead, I’m going to jump into the middle, with a tiny detail of my setup—one that vexed me for days and caused me to watch movies incorrectly for about a week.

My Blu-ray player is a Sony Playstation 3. It is connected via HDMI to my pre-amp, which is in turn connected to my projector via another HDMI cable. It’s about the simplest possible configuration, and yet each noun in that last sentence is easily worth an entire post on its own. You can see why I’ve found the prospect of documenting this so daunting. Nevertheless, I’ll dodge the ratholes and plug onward with my two-day ordeal that boiled down to one incorrect setting.

My theater is in a large room, so I opted for a 7.1 system. This means that in addition to left and right surround speakers, I also have a pair of rear surrounds, for a total of seven primary speakers. I figure most of you know all about this, but if you’d like a refresher, here’s a good article on the basics of 5.1 and 7.1.

Most home theaters not only don’t require 7.1, but they could even be compromised by the addition of rear surrounds. The purpose of the surround channels is to provide an immersive, ambient soundfield. In many home settings, it’s hard enough to position two surround speakers correctly. My theater room is large enough and has enough space behind the viewer that I could add the additional two speakers for 7.1.

But I didn’t do it at first, because I needed to build custom mounts to allow the flat-backed speakers to hang vertically off my pitched, open-beam walls. I documented this process on Twitter, from my SketchUp plans to my first cuts, and finally to staining and hanging the mounts.

Prior to this project, my rear surrounds sat in their box for months, and many a movie was watched in “only” 5.1 channels. I assure you, no one complained.

When I finally got the rear surrounds mounted and wired (speaker wire is another perilous rathole to dodge for now), I popped in Pixar’s Brave, which features an optional 7.1 Dolby TrueHD soundtrack. I waded through the punishing pre-menu crap that defines the Blu-ray experience, selected the 7.1 option, and played the movie.

And no sound came out of my rear surrounds.

The 7.1 of Silence

This launched me down a two-day path of trying various disks and various settings. I won’t bore you with the details, but there are a few salient points:

Many Pixar Blu-rays come with a home theater setup “maximizer,” lovingly made by some very smart folks at Pixar who care about your home viewing and listening experience. Found under Setup in the menu, it features discrete test tones for all six or eight of your audio channels.

In my case, different disks failed in different ways. Brave and Monsters University sent no sound to the rears, but Cars 2 (a DTS disk) did, just mixed up with the other surround channels.

There are also discrete channel test tones on the Digital Video Essentials: HD Basics disk, and my system passed their test. HD Basics was able to send a discrete sound to the rear surrounds. So not every disk failed.

At some point you have to stop futzing and start enjoying, so the wife and I popped in Tron: Legacy (a DTS disk which did send sound to the rears), and watched it. Or rather, listened to it, because as pretty as the film often is, it’s the soundtrack that inspired me to buy the disk.

The Daft Punk soundtrack filled the room. It sounded great. I was singing the praises of 7.1—despite a nagging feeling that something was still amiss.

There’s a scene in Tron: Legacy where someone knocks at a door positioned directly behind the viewer. The knocking seemed to originate directly from the back of our theater. Michelle even turned her head, perfectly illustrating one of my big reservations about aggressive 7.1 mixes. Localized surround events can sometimes be the opposite of “immersive,” reminding you that the visuals, unlike the sound, are happening only in a window in front of you.

As a home theater nerd, you want a disk or two on hand that will really show off the system, but, if you’re like me, you’ll find that your favorite movies are more reserved in their surround mixes. Surround should be subtle, and when you install 7.1 at home, you’re paying twice as much for a little more subtlety.

The next day, I did some more troubleshooting. I suspected that Tron, like the also-DTS Cars 2, was being mixed down somehow and sending identical signals to the surrounds on each side. I found the scene with the door knock, and stood next to my LR surround. The knock played equally in the SR and the SBR.

Confident now that I had yet to actually hear true discrete 7.1 in my theater, I resumed my research, and found this article at Engadget, which contained the answer.

In the video settings on my PS3, I has somehow set HDMI to output digital audio as “bitstream” rather than Linear PCM. Read the Engadget article for more on what that means—but in my case, the ramification was that I wasn’t getting true 7.1.[1]

Even though I knew that the PS3 needs to decode 7.1 itself and output it as uncompressed discrete channels (LPCM) as opposed to sending the unprocessed audio track and letting the receiver do the decoding, which already put me into a niche group of well-researched home theater nerds, this incredibly critical audio setting was buried in the Video settings, so I’d missed it.

I switched my HDMI audio output to LPCM and returned to the knocking scene. Now the knock came discretely out of the rear surrounds.[2] The Maximizer on both the Dolby and DTS Pixar disks sent discrete signals to each channel. Victory!

A Chapter About a Bolt

In The Hunt For Red October (the book), author Tom Clancy begins a chapter with a detailed description of a single bolt in a helicopter—how it works, and how, on this particular day, it failed. Here, I’ve written over a thousand words to describe how I got one simple setting wrong on my Blu-ray player, and wound up stuck for days not getting the most out of my home theater. While no one will make an awesome movie about my experience, I do think it was worth sharing, and I hope you agree.

Setting up a home theater is fraught with just this kind of pitfall, and clear, concise articles like that one from Engadget are rare. But even more rare is clear, trustworthy information on some of the less pushbutton-oriented aspects of home theater. There are endless debates about speakers, endless opinions on how much you should spend on cables, and hundreds of “experts” with fringe opinions and loud voices. There’s an entire industry of home theater and audiophile exploitation that I waded through in order to get to the point where I could be one, simple setting away from hearing movies correctly in my home. If you’re interested, I’ll write more about this in the future, in the hopes of cutting through some of that noise.

Right after I comb through my Blu-ray library for another 7.1 movie to watch.

1. The HD Basics disk didn’t fail because it’s only 6.1, which can be sent over HDMI as Bitstream from a PS3.  ↩
2. Why did the door knock seem so perfectly isolated to the rear in our initial, mixed-down viewing, when it was actually evenly distributed among all four surround channels? That’s a great rathole for a future post.  ↩

Nikon Df vs. Canon 5D Mark III vs. Fuji X100S

Recent retro camera fashion has, refreshingly, brought back “real” camera functionality. But covering a camera with knobs and dials isn’t automatically a win.

Nikon has announced the Df, a 16.2 megapixel, full-frame, retro-styled DSLR. And oops, no, that’s not a picture of it above. That’s my trusty Nikkormat that my dad gave me as a high school graduation gift. I have lots of Nikon lenses left over from those days, along with an abiding affection for the company, burned into my muscle memory by the wonderful heft and feel of a solid, manual camera with satisfyingly clickable buttons and dials.

So I, along with the rest of the photography world, watched with interest as Nikon expertly teased the Df with a series of videos. The brief glimpses—and the satisfying clicks in the soundtrack—seemed to promise a return to this tactile, manual photographic experience.

The camera is announced now, and available for preorder at about $3,000 with the matching (fashion!) 50mm lens.

Here’s the actual Df

I like that retro styling is becoming a way for camera makers to demonstrate their commitment to serious photography, because pretty cameras are pretty, but mostly because physical knobs and dials are often better than menus for common camera functions.

But as great as these physical UI elements look, what really matters is how they feel. As I wrote back in 2008, we should not lust after specs or superficial qualities of a camera, but instead seek the most transparent possible liaison between our artistic intent and the images we want to make.

No one who hasn’t touched a Df knows how it fares on that front. So I turned, as I often do, to my buddy Gordon Laing and his amazing Camera Labs site. He spent some time with the Df at a recent Nikon press event.

Retro styling is all about nostalgia, but industries move on for a reason. So in order to be successful with a retro concept, I believe you have to serve it with a generous dollop of the modern too. Trouble is, this is not always an easy balance to get right.

Gordon seems to conclude that Nikon didn’t quite get it right. For myself, I’ve concluded that I already own an expensive, hefty, full-frame DSLR—and while it might not look hipster-retro, it feels great, and using it is second nature to me. Upon closer inspection today, I was reminded that it is, in fact, covered with knobs and dials.

Oh, and it shoots video too, which the Df does not. And it has more megapixels, and a faster shutter, and a dial that adjusts shutter speed in 1/3 stop increments (instead of full-stop), because it’s designed to work well, not just look cool.

The same can be said for Nikon’s D800, which beats out the 5D Mark III in many comparisons.

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I love my big old 5D Mark III, but I am not immune to the allure of a retro body. For me, the right choice there is something very different from my interchangeable lens photography experience. Earlier this year, I bought a Fujifilm X100S. It’s a 16MP APC-C camera with a fixed 23mm ƒ2.0 lens that sells for “only” $1,300. It’s small enough that I take it places I wouldn’t take my DSLR (such as a wedding at which I’m the best man), it makes nice pictures, and while it’s nice that it looks great, it’s even better that it feels great. And to me, it nails that retro/innovation balance that Gordon so eloquently described. It has focus peaking for manual focus assist (a feature that requires stills camera makers to step outside their comfort zone and adopt something every video shooter knows is great), and a clever hybrid viewfinder that’s always the first thing I show off when folks are curious about the camera.

I’m not accusing Nikon of stepping over the fashion/functionality line with the Df. That’s a decision that every photographer should make for themselves, preferably by feel. I’m honestly thrilled that companies like Nikon, Fuji, and Sony are competing for turf that used to be owned expensively and complacently by Leica. There are now numerous ways to bring a physical, retro feel to your photography experience, and much to consider before you spend your modern dollars.

I won’t be buying the Df, but if you do, consider using this link to support the site.